Farelogix has announced Project Hawkeye, the travel industry's first open-source, web-based agent desktop application. Unlike the closed systems and proprietary user interfaces in place today, Project Hawkeye will enable travel suppliers and travel agencies to buy and sell products based on their unique agency/corporate policies and workflows, Farelogix said. The first public download date is scheduled for March 26, 2009.
"Traditional point-of-sale systems have become a real barrier to innovation in our industry," said Jim Davidson, president and CEO of Farelogix. "We are in a world where travel suppliers and travel agencies want to buy and sell products differently to optimize their relationships, but the closed systems and proprietary user interfaces in place today don't allow them to. The challenges associated with most proprietary point-of-sale systems is they simply cannot keep pace with new requirements such as user/customer preferencing, attribute-selling, multi-source management, or new content acquisition, to name a few; or they are not being adopted by agents because they don't properly reflect agency or corporate policy productivity requirements or workflows unique to their business. The idea of Project Hawkeye is to remove these barriers, expedite innovation, and engage a community development concept."
Under the open source model, users will have free access to the Hawkeye application source code, supporting documentation and the opportunity to exchange feedback and share development enhancements and suggestions in a community environment.
"With Project Hawkeye, Farelogix seeks to increase the speed, quality and cost-effectiveness with which new point of sale alternatives are introduced to the market," Davidson continued. "We believe the best way to do this is to build a collaborative development community where source code is free, and best of breed ideas are shared and built upon. Gone is the problem of proprietary vendor lock-in, where you can't customize the user interface without waiting for a new version or hiring consulting services. Instead, anyone can take Hawkeye and make it their own - and the entire community benefits in the process."
The Hawkeye application is designed to support air, car and hotel shopping, booking and servicing, including unbundled selling (merchandising), reservation servicing (exchange, refund, upgrades, seat assignments, etc.), and profile integration with legacy or third party systems. Designed for a
content-independent environment, the system enables users to create, manage and service multi-source PNR's. Hawkeye can be used either with the proprietary Farelogix FLXT platform (which supports a robust business rules engine and connectivity to a variety of traditional systems, supplier direct connect, and web-based content), or separate from Farelogix, when users
choose to develop their own connection to travel inventory sources.
Visit www.farelogix.com.