Travelport and Apple Vacations, among the largest tour operators in North America, announced today that Apple Vacations had dumped Sabre [my words] and completed the conversion to Travelport's Worldspan, with all of its bells and whistles, including e-Pricing for low fares, Travelport Rapid Reprice for automatic ticket repricing, and XML Pro for structured data exchanges.
In the 5-year deal, Worldspan becomes Apple Vacations' preferred GDS, and in addition to getting air, rail and hotel content, the tour operator gets the "added ability to book low-cost air content," the companies stated.
If you read between the lines of the press release, Sabre and Apple Vacations must have had a big falling out because Jeff Mullen, Apple Vacations executive vice president, states: "We made the conversion to Travelport for many reasons but chief among these is that the Travelport team invested considerable time in analyzing our business and consulting with us beforehand and during, to ensure they understood our goals and challenges."
In other words, take that Sabre.
And, Travelport GDS spokeswoman Jill Brenner notes that Apple Vacatiions was "blown away" by Worldspan's capablities.
The agreement is the latest coup for Worldspan, which in June began powering air searches for MLT Vacations and the multiple brands it powers, including Worry-Free Vacations, Delta Vacations and Continental Airlines Vacations.
But, Apple Vacations' transition to Worldspan leaves me completely underwhelmed because of the state of the tour operator industry and its technology status.
Tnooz editor Kevin May writes about the airline industry approaching the breaking point in terms of its legacy technology, but the tour operator industry globally is in similar straits.
So, here's the deal: Worldspan has ample experience in powering online agency websites, and its fare search and Rapid Reprice capabilities, by all accounts, are state of the art.
But, when I took the Apple Vacations website out for a spin, its air-search capabilities were severely sub-standard.
And, this is not a Worldspan issue. Just try an air search on Orbitz and you will see what Worldspan's air-search technology can do. [Actually, as Douglas Quinby points out below, the more appropriate testing ground would be Expedia.com and not Orbitz, which uses ITA Software for air searches and Worldspan for availability queries.]
So, from the homepage on the Apple Vacations website, users get the option to search for "flight only." I did that and searched for a Jan. 5-12 round-trip flight from JFK to Acapulco. I inputted the information and it transported my query to a second page, where I had to enter some of the information again. After I did that, the response came back that there were no flights available between JFK and Acapulco Jan. 5-12, 2010.
So, I tried the same search from Newark (EWR) to Acapulco -- and received the same non-results.
Then, I searched for an Acapulco vacation package from JFK and finally I got some airline options.
Well, correct that.
It gave me one flight option only, and it was on Mexicana Airlines.
OK, so this clearly is not a Worldspan issue.
Obviously, Apple Vacations, which runs its own chartered airline service through sister company USA 3000 Airlines, has preferenced the Worldspan air searches to comply with Apple Vacations' preferred relationships and business deals.
And, where does this leave the consumer?
Why would consumers bother to search Apple Vacations, with all of its inflexibility, when they might go search for a dynamic package on Expedia or Travelocity?
In Europe, the issues between Thomas Cook and BlueSky punctuate the problems that tour operators and wholesalers have with their antiquated technology and the challenge of melding new systems with old.
Behind the scenes, perhaps Apple Vacations' agents have deft new capabilities at their disposal using Worldspan instead of Sabre.
But, that is invisible to consumers seeking to go online and and book an Apple Vacations package.
Thus, the Apple Vacations-Worldspan agreement highlights the ongoing technology and business limitations that run roughshod through the tour operator industry, in the U.S. and globally.
After all, several weeks ago I asked the head of the U.S. Tour Operators Association what he thinks of Viator as a competitor, and he had never heard of the company.
Apple Vacations and the tour operator industry as a whole need to approach the 21st Century differently than they did the 20th Century.