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Worldspan employs interactive tools

Worldspan has simplified car rental and hotel booking capabilities for travel agency subscribers with advanced, interactive tools that sit right on the travel agent’s desktop. The new Worldspan Go!SM Car and Hotel Booking products are timesaving tools that allow agents to shop and book travel for their clients in a rich media, browser-based environment, using the latest technologies and interactive features.

These are the latest solutions developed by Worldspan to help travel agents become more productive and increase commission opportunities.

“Worldspan’s new car and hotel booking tools present an abundance of new and unique capabilities not previously available to our subscribers—all timesaving features that eliminate manual processing and increase speed and productivity,” said Graham Nichols, Worldspan vice president - EMEA. “These powerful desktop tools are further examples of our ongoing initiative to deliver solutions that help agencies operate more efficiently, build traveler satisfaction and increase their revenues.”

The Go! Car Booking tool is a total package giving agents the option to book and sell car rentals by first shopping availability and information—or quickly ‘direct sell’ a car.

Shopping off-airport car rental locations has been simplified through a new feature that searches locations by post code. This feature expands already-rich search criteria, which includes shopping by city name, by airport or from an all locations list. To further assist agents in decision making, a new comparison-shopping feature provides results based on price, location, car company and car company address. New mapping navigation tools let agents plot rental locations on a map and access driving directions, which can be printed to assist travelers at their destinations. Additionally, booking data can be automatically pre-populated from existing reservations—a big time saver for agents. All searches and bookings are completed using point-and-click and mouse-over functionality, interactive links, pop-up calendars, dialog boxes and more.

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Travel agents can arrange hotel reservations in seconds with the new Go! Hotel Booking tool, a one-stop shopping and booking solution. The tool is helpful to travel agents who are unfamiliar with traditional GDS formats, which are eliminated from the agent’s buying experience and replaced by intuitive point-and-click access to Worldspan’s global hotel content and booking functionality. Agents have at their command an array of new and unique hotel search capabilities, and all-new sorting and display options, including a feature that displays only available hotels. Agents can view property images to assist in making purchase decisions, save hotels during a search and also save “My Favorite” hotel search for subsequent shopping requests. Maps and driving directions are also available, and interactive functionality automatically populates reservation fields with traveler data from existing PNRs. The new tool interfaces with the Worldspan global reservations system, ensuring agents receive real-time availability and rate information from hotel suppliers. All of the new features are designed to save time, build travel agent productivity, eliminate phone calls to hotel suppliers for information and availability and help travel agencies provide higher service levels to travelers.

Travel agents can access the new tools within the Worldspan Go! Script Index on their desktops, and simply select Car Booking or Hotel Booking.
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