RE: idleHmm, not sure I entirely agree with your analysis Van. But I do take your point about being civil though, so my apologies Jet.
LL+ went live last year no this, and was generating insignificant transactions and incomes (< $100 per day mostly). Main problem seemed to be that TA's wanted to know whether a flight was booked while they had the customer on the phone. The ABM (automated booking message) was taking too long to generate a reply, so TA's were continuing to pick up the phone and call the consolidator direct. It was a dismal failure as a product.
I don't agree that consolidators do not want to give Outsiders, (well actually their customers, the TA's) access to their inventory. A computer program can reliabley, quickly and autmatically check availability, flight restrictions have been met, book flight and pass on confirmation to the TA. If SCS's realtime booking engine does not do that, then TA's will continue to use the phones, Consolidators will have extra overheads of large telesales people, and we (SCS) won't make any transaction fees.
Blackbird (as it was called in 1999) / Airtek in 2000 / 2001 / Realtime booking engine as it now seems to be called came onstream this year. It also gets referred to as Livelinnx plus realtime..... which is maybe where you understandabley got confused. A NR on 3rd March said five consolidators were live on it.
The IP/GDS API allowing consolidators with their own systems and databases to distribute info / sell tickets over Solarnet went live with it's first customer, Matel this month.
Both of these products remove the requirement for human intervention from the consolidator, vastly reducing their overheads. This is the product we were promised way back in 1999, and even two years late, it still has very big potential. I don't beleive we will hit half a million tickets as one person suggested this year, but profitability and accelerating revenue growths are well within reach, next year, who knows. I am sure that when the ticket sales become significant we will begin to hear what they are in NR's. Also, I have said and still beleive that we are unlikjely to see Tourtek deals until the company is on a sound financial footing (ie profitable), so the possibilities for Tourtek sales come nearer is the realtime booking engine is successful. A real snowball effect.
Van, you said Tourtek was not transaction based. Tourtek burea is transaction based and I think you will find that the full version of Tourtek is/will be capable of managing realtime fare information and bookings over Solarnet. The reason for the name Airtek was because it was to be part of Tourtek.
I haven't seen the real-time booking engine in practice, or heard anything from anyone that has, if the software is well written and well received, we are on a home run. If not......
Well looking forward to future NR's or any info people have about how new product is going down with COnsolidators and TA's.
Idle