RE: Northwest AirI have no idea of the inventory break down Sony, Bob may be a good person to call and ask.
My interest is in TT at the moment, and number of systems LIVE. For a few years on the board I have been saying that GDS's are fighting a rear guard action and losing market share allong with TA's. SCS's remained focussed on GDS distribution, should have delivered a world class application for this 3 yeasrs ago but product never lived up to it. Also said that the end game in this tranition was about who hosts the inventory on a platform that can distribute it, at least over the internet.
Openfares and many others showed the way forward with Consolidator fares. Expoedia, Travelocity etc have picked up the batton of the old GDS's and shown the benefits of large distribution portals providing searchable database of inventory that can be purched realtime online by the customer. Much cheaper to operate than old GDS systems and TA's. It was interesting that in Jet's TA, most agents were using Travelocity too rather than Sabres green screen.
LLX have a great idea, providing a central link to the smaller hotels, hostels etc on a single distributable booking platform. Potentially giving these little suppliers some of the same advantages in distribution of the Marriots and Hiltons of this world who have huge centralised databaes hooking into GDS's, Web Portals etc.
TT is trying to do the same with Tour companies, we are one of many, it's a labour intensive side of the market, I don't see us growing rapidly, or share price rocketing, but if we start to see slow steady deliveries, slow acceleration as we take on more manpower, new distribution deals as more compnaies want access to the customer data we host then we can imo expect steady growth. There is a huge market out there, all we need to do is open our little mouth and take as big a bite as we can.
SP is bad for compnay at the momnet. We need to see these compnaies going live, income rising and breakeven being passed. We need to look healthy for people to cut the links to their old systems and commit their business. We simpoly have to push forward, get the systems to be what they want till the benefits of switching outweigh the risks.
The compnay is taking on more staff to this end and working hard. They could do with 2-3 times the number of staff in Markham imo, but this wmay take another year maybe. By that time will will have seen some key compnaies going live and putting all their business through TT/SB.
Will there be another financing before then? I hope not at these levels. Solars USA and Solarnet appear to be profitable, the former doing very well and needing more staff! Not expected, and so much for training these staff up on TT/SB. Even LLX looking up, so it all revolves around loading up and disrtibuting inventory from the flagship product TT/SB