By: David J. Wardell

© 2000 By: David J. Wardell.  Reproduction or redistribution in any form without written permission is strictly prohibited.

The view is now firmly fixed in the consumer’s mind that if a computer works at all it works wonderfully and that it must surely be the fastest and best way to get anything done.

The travel industry is awash with entrepreneurs who steadfastly maintain that the key to their e-commerce success is a proprietary way to perform never before seen fare-finding feats. Thereby, it is reasoned, the traveling public benefits because finally they are getting the "best deal."

This aura of mystery is maintained by the almost casual use of such terms as "artificial intelligence" and other seemingly profound jargon that convey a high-tech image and reinforce the view that the majority of the travel industry, lacking access to such robust tools, must surely be behind the times and deliver inferior results.

This is one area where agents can legitimately make the case for their ability to deliver efficient and effective customer service. In the end, there is no sustainable competitive differentiation in cheaper prices and proprietary gadgets are not the secret to finding them.

George Smith, who is Chief Technology Officer of ConXtra, LLC in Seattle, and who has personally developed among the most innovative and successful travel productivity and transaction-handling software, once observed to me that "Artificial Intelligence" refers to "Anything we can’t do yet." The point is well taken here: delivering the prices and services a customer can reasonably use is a function of much more than can be embodied in software.

Despite years of effort and howls of protest to the contrary, airfare pricing remains as much an art as a science. A human agent takes fare information, makes determinations based upon experience, evaluates choices and weighs alternatives, and suggests a strategy that takes these and many other variables into account.

That human today uses a CRS fare database and pricing engine as tools, but limiting the activities the human performs to the specific application of the tool is an oversimplification. This is one reason most frequent travelers can easily cite examples where an agent was able to "beat" the sophisticated pricing engines.

Certainly there are exceptions, and clearly many more simple itineraries where applying the tool to the case at hand is all that is required, but a fundamental error of logic is to argue from the specific to the general, and the general case is that human agents manage the pricing process most quickly and effectively.

When one looks deeper the technology challenge becomes more daunting. It is unclear why competitive differentiation through faring should be achievable as long as the fare and rule database used resides in a CRS and is already accessible through quite usable CRS-based tools (which agents routinely couple with expert knowledge in order to serve their customers).

Replacing that CRS database with a "better" one is not practical. Most people are unaware of the extensive organization, correction, and update energy that is embodied in such a database—and that no one not in a similar business could afford to expend.

Agents use consolidators, negotiated fares, and business relationships to deliver a satisfactory result to the customer—all are not software-driven and are routinely undervalued by "agent in a box" development.

The real business world is more complex and dynamic than the public or mainstream journalists who live in a gadget-driven society realize. Technology applied in the right situations at the right time delivers powerful results, but the proper role of the human interface must never be lost.