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Travelport GDS

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Travelport GDS, Atlanta, GA
Company Description: Travelport GDS is one of the world’s largest global distribution system (GDS) providers operating both the Galileo and the Worldspan brands, providing real-time travel information and booking capabilities to online and offline travel agencies in over 145 countries. Travelport GDS is a division of Travelport, one of the world’s largest service providers to the travel industry.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Software Development Solution

Nomination Title: Travelport Live Map Shopping

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Travelport powers the travel industry on a global scale by connecting buyers and sellers through agency, online and corporate travel channels. As a leading provider of critical transaction processing solutions and data, we bring cutting edge technologies to our customers to keep them at their competitive best.               
               
Within this realm, Travelport recognized air fare shopping was becoming highly competitive and an evolving customer concern. The assumption that travel shoppers visited websites with a clear idea of what they are looking for was no longer valid. Remarkably, industry studies prove that from half to two third leisure travelers are not focused on any one destination when starting travel research.                
               
Recognizing the need to both inspire and inform consumer choice, Travelport’s Global Technology Services (GTS) team set specific goals to develop an open-destination air fare search product that finds competitively priced, geographically diverse options, but avoids the pitfalls of cached and pre-calculated selections. Limits of current map shopping applications – the narrow range of destinations, dates, and travel duration, would not be acceptable. Above all, air fare quotes had to be accurate and viable.
               
As a result, the GTS and Product teams identified six specific goals in a set of revolutionary requirements. Search must:               
               
1. Allow and consider origination and destination from any airport
2. Offer a low-cost advantage               
3. Be accurate and bookable                
4. Respond in time comparable or less than current shopping products
5. Utilize existing API to facilitate ease of adoption               
6. Have an affordable cost profile                
               
Travelport Live Map Shopping
              
The GTS architecture team realized that the current caching approach would never achieve its lofty goals. A truly unique approach was necessary to provide accurate and unrestricted destination open shopping. Through intensive design and planning sessions, the architecture team orchestrated an innovative design for the industry’s first live (non-cached) map search transaction.

Travelport’s fares and pricing developers joined efforts to leverage proprietary fare search algorithms to make the search live as opposed to cached:                
               
• They reconstructed single-destination algorithms to consider all destinations                     
• Applications that regularly handle tens of thousands of flights were remodeled to consider millions of flight and fare combinations across hundreds of destinations in real time.                
• Based on the search criteria, these live calculations also locate the most attractive destination and flight pattern, while responding to fare sales and constantly changing flight inventory in mere seconds.                
               
The results of the innovative design, development and implementation of groundbreaking search algorithms:               
               
• Meets and exceeds all design goals, providing the industry’s first live (non- cached) air fare mapping solution           
• Significantly reduces research time with a single transaction that reveals an accurate picture of travel options and empowers Travelport customers to attract and retain consumers             
• Previewed to a select group of customers with outstanding results and rewarding feedback denoting the business value, convenience, measurable productivity gains, cost savings, revenue generation and improved customer service            
• A major airline readily adopted the technology and is currently rolling it  out as an industry exclusive 
• Supporting current open API standards, Travelport anticipates swift adoption and reduced shopping transactions; lowering operating costs for Travelport and its partner travel suppliers worldwide.

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Mark Ryan is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Travelport. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, he has global responsibility for formulating and executing the company’s technology strategy, including software solutions and applications development. Mark leads a team of more than 850 Travelport technology professionals worldwide with development hubs located in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City and Langley, UK. He also oversees Travelport’s joint venture technology operation in Delhi, India, as well as managing an additional 1,000 development staff through relationships with application partners and service providers in Asia, North America and Europe.

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