Travelport GDS Offers New FlightStats Data, Hotel Sales Opportunities

Travelport GDS has completed the systems interfaces that will offer its subscribers access to the web-based services of FlightStats. FlightStats’ global on-time flight performance system and intelligent itinerary monitoring service are available immediately via the Internet to Travelport GDS subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. This includes traditional and online travel agencies, and corporations that rely on the Worldspan and Apollo GDSs for global travel planning and management.

Through FlightStats and Travelport GDS, travel agencies and corporations can reduce travel costs, choose flights with the highest on-time status, and maintain full visibility of every traveler in transit. They can also proactively manage unexpected travel situations within travel policy, and improve travel outcomes for inconvenienced, stressed travelers. Highlights include:

*    Alerts about disrupted trips due to delays, cancellations, missed connections, gate changes, security wait times, travel advisories, health alerts and severe weather.
*    Real-time travel alerts sent to traveler mobile devices.
*    Global traveler itinerary tracking for corporate travel and security departments.
*    Historical on-time performance statistics for flights on airlines worldwide.

“Travel managers cannot eliminate problems for travelers in transit, but with FlightStats, they are empowered with high-touch traveler services and also the tools they need to protect revenues and control travel costs,” said Chris Zando, head of global business development for Travelport GDS. “The ability to proactively manage trip disruptions for travelers has become a priority for corporations and a strong competitive advantage for today’s agencies. FlightStats provides that ability and serves as a safety net for travelers on the road.”

“This is an enormous win for Travelport agencies and their customers,” said Jeff Kennedy, CEO of Conducive Technology, which produces FlightStats. “Leveraging their GDSs to enable FlightStats messaging and monitoring of travelers makes these innovative capabilities easy to implement by any agency or corporation.”

Visit www.flightstats.com.

Travelport GDS also announced that it reached  a new agreement with accommodation-only website, Hotels4U.com to offer Worldspan-connected users extensive hotel and accommodation content worldwide.

The new deal will, for the first time, allow Hotels4U.com to distribute its hotel inventory via a GDS. Hotels4U.com offers more than 1,000 unique hotels, apartments and villas worldwide, in resort and in city locations, to all Worldspan-connected users via an XML link from the its website.

“Hotels4U.com has built its success on the growth of dynamic packaging and leisure agents are already well-versed in maximizing their earnings by taking advantage of the great net rates we offer," said John Harding, sales and marketing director for Hotels4U.com. "By partnering with Worldspan we expect this to continue, as well as giving us access to a number of market-leading travel management companies.”

Jane Lewis, senior director of hospitality and car rental, Travelport GDS, added: “We are very focused on giving our travel agency customers access to the richest hotel content possible and I am sure they will find the new Hotels4U.com content on Worldspan a very valuable addition.”

Visit www.travelportgds.com.