Viewdata ‘a technical cul-de-sac’
TUI Northern Europe chief information officer, Jim Mann told a travel technology conference yesterday that as far as Lunn Poly is concerned, Viewdata is dead.
Mr Mann told delegates at the TTI Conference that the Genie system, which is installed in over 100 Lunn Poly shops in the UK and in a call centre in Glasgow, would replace Viewdata, unless it failed. He said: “I am absolutely certain that we will have trip-ups along the way, and it is good to have the fall-back of the Viewdata system, but as we move on it will be harder for agents to switch back”.
“It [Viewdata] ought to be dead, but it is still showing signs of breathing.”
Mr Mann said that he did see a time when the printed brochure would become redundant. He said: “Lunn Poly is effectively a big electronic printed brochure – you only have to look at our figures that show 85 percent of offline bookings were researched online.”
Mr Mann said that TUI had been making the switch to web enabled systems since early 2000. “With Viewdata we have found ourselves down a technical cul-de-sac. Agents can provide less information during a browsing process than consumers can get at home”.
He said that he hadn’t put a date on the end of Viewdata, but that consumers were demanding more than Viewdata could supply. He said travel suppliers needed to work together to create industry infrastructure, through forums such as TTI. TUI has stepped up its involvement with TTI by becoming a shareholder.
Read our previous stories:
08-Oct-2002 UK operators offered Viewdata replacement
24-Sept-2002 TTI conference to tackle distribution issues ‘head-on’
12-July-2002 Anite narrowly avoids crash landing
01 Jul 2002: The TravelMole Interview: Howard Frost, Travelink
26 Jun 2002: Former Anite marketing director Howard Frost joins Travelink
18 Apr 2002: Viewdata to stay, say industry heavyweights
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