Stories about: Open Travel Alliance

A patent claim by IBM Corp. covering a submission it made to the electronic-business XML standards body created a furor last week over the notion of open standards and the ability of vendors to curb their proprietary tendencies.

Travel companies and the technology vendors that serve them are calling for open standards to integrate travel packages, but the industry is so mired in legacy technology that it will likely be fighting that battle for years.

In what analysts expect to be the first of many similar agreements for the coming year, Northwest Airlines Inc. and Continental Airlines Inc. this week began selling integrated electronic tickets in conjunction with computerized reservations system operator Worldspan LP.

At the eTravelWorld conference here yesterday, operators of established computerized reservation systems and online business-to-business travel upstarts engaged in a terse war of words over which side has the more highly evolved technology.

Years ago, Chicago-based McCord Travel Management oversaw travel policies for its 2,000 corporate clients from a network of call centers. Business travelers who needed to know if their plans complied with their company's policy had to submit requests by fax, and agents wouldn't respond for 24 to 48 hours. Clients found this waiting period annoying, says Paul Craft, McCord's vice president of technology, and they pleaded for improvement.

When ClubComputer.com started selling computer products on the web in November 1998, it relied on a rather quaint back-end fulfillment system. The startup company e-mailed orders to suppliers, who manually entered the data into their own systems before processing and shipping merchandise to customers. CEO Dennis Tracz knew the system was far from cutting edge for a web-based business, but it seemed to hold up to ClubComputer.com's daily intake of 100 orders. Then last July the company hit it big following a stint as a featured merchant on the CNet Shopper site. Volume went from $200,000 a month to $1 million in 10 days, burying the e-mail ordering system.