By: David J. Wardell

© 1992 By: David J. Wardell.  Reproduction or redistribution in any form without written permission is strictly prohibited.

Today’s major CRSs are based on airline reservation system projects undertaken in the late 1950s.

Several pioneering projects were launched as joint efforts between major computer suppliers and airlines; one of their major goals was "productivity enhancement."

During those years it took roughly one hour to process a single reservation.

This was viewed as unsustainable over time and justified the extraordinary (by the standards of the time) investments automation required.

It is interesting to note the long-term effects CRS development has had on travel agency productivity.

Agents got computers beginning in 1976 but I believe productivity in most agencies has shown no real increase for the past 10 years; there are no developments on the commercial horizon that promise to get productivity moving anytime soon.

This is among the most serious and basic difficulties facing the industry today.

Remember that unacceptable 1950s productivity was one reservation per hour; for many large, successful travel agencies it is still one per hour.

When I use this example the invariable response is: "Well, agents today do so much more," to which I reply: "Whatever it is they do, it must be awfully high value, because they sure spend a lot of time doing it."

Technology and software could change this miserable performance, but there are problems.

The most important is that few developers really know what productivity enhancements to build.

The answers are not obvious, little help from the user community has been forthcoming, development is expensive and the risk of failure is great.

Second and less conspicuous are the unrealistic pricing and user expectations that are pervasive in the travel technology industry.

Where developers cannot reasonably expect real financial returns and sensible ongoing support commitments, it is difficult to find the basis for new projects.

Still, there is no alternative to diligently seeking productivity solutions. Even very modest productivity increases (in the right areas) can yield enormous financial benefit.

Developing automation solutions that are:

1. Effective.
   

2. Sustainable.
   

3. Can truly be used to increase basic productivity without requiring a higher overall skill level should be the standard by which travel technology is measured in 1992.

Present productivity tool projects, meager though they may be, focus on correcting deficiencies of older systems. This is why, for example, there are numerous products available that take data from accounting systems and make something customers will find useful out of it.

Other projects under way in the industry are addressing illusionary, rather than real, productivity issues—hence they frequently achieve illusionary results:

• Productivity through compromise.  If you diminish overall workloads you create the impression of being more productive. Such tactics are tried by those who eliminate or limit quality control steps for certain segments of their business.
  

• Productivity after the fact. Many agencies use computers to audit reservations or otherwise trap errors, either in a wholly automated QC environment or as workstation-based aids to the QC process.

While these are useful tools, they are not productivity systems. They are limited to correcting, not preventing, errors and they do little to raise overall reservations throughout.

• Productivity through weird science. So-called artificial intelligence, "knowledge-based systems" or "robotic travel agents" occasionally pop up as productivity solutions.

Aside from the fact that the technology most developers employ is of questionable worth, such projects can only be classed with traditional tools that try to correct older system deficiencies—none as yet has tried to reengineer the basic elements of travel agency inefficiency.

This reengineering looks like:

• Tools that assist in getting work right the first time — eliminating, not enhancing, QC.
  

• Delivering true customer service (defined as the ability to organize product presentation so as to give people what they really want to buy).
  

• Organizing the knowledge base (so that knowledge relating to customer service is equally and readily accessible to experienced and inexperienced operators).

The measure of success is when basic productivity numbers, such as tickets per hour, start improving overall.

Finding and implementing productivity solutions isn’t easy, but this may mean the difference between survival and failure in coming years, where competition promises even tighter margins and increased costs.