In unveiling its global mobile solution, mobileXtend, American Express Business Travel has come up with an offering that is global distribution system and corporate-booking tool agnostic.
Using new and proprietary Digital Travel Record technology, Amex collects and automatically updates road warriors' itineraries regardless of which GDSs their corporations may contract with or which corporate-booking tool was used for the transaction.
And, this is true whether the booking is made online or offline, Amex says.
mobileXtend offers itinerary management and notification solutions from WorldMate, Rearden Commerce and conTgo.
Thus, business travelers using WorldMate and Rearden Commerce through Amex would seemingly get all of their itineraries automatically synched up.
In contrast, TripCase users would have to make their bookings through Sabre or Sabre's GetThere unit to get similar treatment.
"For the traveler, this means PNRs (passenger name records) are automatically updated on their mobile devices," says Amex spokeswoman Tracy Paurowski, referring to mobileXtend. "They do not have to do anything (i.e. forward the confirmation emails). If there is a booking modification that is also automatically updated."
"For the company," Paurowski says, "it means faster mobile deployments on a global scale since they are using a single repository of booking data."
That's because individual GDS integrations are no longer needed with DTR to extract the data, she adds.
So, how does DTR work?
Instead of getting updates through GDS queuing, Amex now uses Web services to enable the data exchange through the DTR technology.
The result is more than a Super PNR, Paurowski says.
"In DTR, PNR data make up approximately 40% of the DTR data fields," she says. "We have fields that include on-trip spending and fields containing information about a traveler's geographical position versus PNR-booked data."
And DTR, which standardizes the electronic data exchanges, is more than a Super PNR because "it combines different parts of the booking supply chain and bridges into other parts, like mobility," Paurowski says.
So, whether business travelers phone a call center or book through their company's booking tool, their itineraries get automatically updated.
In addition to itinerary management, dining searches and currency-converter services, mobileXtend offers additional features via SMS text-messaging from conTgo.
Among them, corporations can text employees to promote compliance with corporate travel policies during the trip, deliver general messages to groups of employees, and send surveys to a group of mobile numbers and capture the responses.
mobileXtend is a free Blackberry and iPhone app for business travelers whose companies are American Express Business Travel clients.