My intention is to share some information you might find relevant for the Tuesday subject of BCD Travel. A very quick take is that BCD Travel is a major provider for booking of plane reservations. But you have to be careful and not think of BCD Travel as simply as a reservations systems provider. From www.bcdtravelinmotion.com web site, you can find where BCD Travel was named the “most admired travel management company” for 2009. Input for this award came from “travel executives from corporations, TMCs, airlines, hotels, global distribution systems, technology providers, car rental firms, payment systems, consultants, financial analysts and media”. Take note that the technology providers were a part of the mix!
One of the links provided by the class schedule included a link to a Wikipedia web page for “computer reservation system” and includes “global distribution systems”. A point made by this web page is that our business world has moved past the day of a computer reservation system run by a single airline to where business consolidations have resulted in multiple GDS’s (such as provided by BCD Travel). BCD Travel systems allow reservations to be booked for travel and lodging for multiple entities (including airlines) from a single site.
Going back to the first paragraph, the players in the travel industry are numerous and not just the airlines. At the end of this posting, you will find a link to a PDF from BCD Travel whose subject is consolidation of travel industry for potential BCD Travel clients. BCD Travel has the expertise and technology to assist clients with consolidation. Potential questions for Tuesday night could deal with topics such as outsourcing, application integration, mergers & acquisitions, technology trends…
From www.btnonline.com (Business Travel News): “BCD's European operations are in the process of standardizing technology platforms and processes. "One part is to look where you can invest in or acquire additional businesses, but another key part of the investment is just building up more infrastructure, whether it’s call centers or technology or sales forces. You can't do one without the other," Buckman said. "Rather than having to build some big call center to handle a multitude of clients, we should be able to network our people together so that we can flow transactions and calls from one location to another."
An aside: Travelport is a large competitor for BCD Travel and was a good case study for my CIS Outsourcing class. Those students who will be taking the Outsourcing class have additional reasons to listen up. I will add that I am not the GDS or BCD Travel expert. My primary reason for this blog posting was to share some initial insight and provoke you to “dig deeper” for your own enlightenment.
BCD Travel White Paper: “One size fits all?”
BCD Travel White Papers
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TMC - travel management company (see first paragraph of the blog posting).
ReplyDeleteInternet-based travel management companies; the big three are Orbitz for Business, Expedia Corporate Travel and Travelocity Business
Very likely this is out of date given this was from an Internet article of August 2004.
More fuel for good questions.
Impressive. I like the research you have done. The company is not very well known despite its size and position. But actually it does tons of things. Thanks for opening the hood a bit.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bill, for providing this information. I enjoyed talking to your class about our company and I hope I answered all your questions.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of BCD travel before, and it took me awhile (and several questions) to even wrap my head around the business model.
ReplyDeleteI loved hearing about how the technologies we're using in class are all being used by a large company. Of course I know these technologies are all in use, but it's good to reaffirm our hard work will pay off in industry.
seems.. world is filled with system integration concepts....:)
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