TRAVELPORT will introduce two new travel products, Travelport Drive Me and Galileo Terminal.
Travelport Drive Me allows travel consultants to book chauffeur-driven car transfers through its GDS for 21 international airports at four destinations – China, India, the Philippines and Singapore.
Based on a tie-up with car rental companies Avis and Hertz, all bookings are commissionable, said Travelport’s regional director of hospitality & car rental Asia-Pacific, Joe Lim.
He added that the service would meet the demand for chauffeur-driven car transfers in Asia, particularly in cities where there are issues with language and security or where public transport is not widely available.
Bay Travel Group Sydney’s key account manager, Ciara Fitzgerald, said such a product would result in time and cost savings as she would traditionally have to liaise with hotels to provide transfer services.
“However when travellers make last-minute changes, we have to call the hotel by phone and there is a cost to this. Our finance people will certainly be happy with Travelport’s new service,” she added.
Reliance Shipping & Travel Agencies’ head of ticketing operations, Juliana Tham, said she anticipated take-up mainly from leisure and business travellers heading to destinations they were unfamiliar with.
“With the two well-known car rental companies, we can be assured of reliable services,” she said.
Lim said by year-end, Travelport Drive Me would work with other car rental firms to provide hotel transfers in destinations such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.
Travelport will also soon introduce a mobile application called Galileo Terminal, to be deployed throughout Asia in October.
With this new app, Galileo travel consultants will no longer need to be in office to make or amend bookings, said Travelport’s head of solutions & support for Asia-Pacific, Linda Kelly-Smith.
“They will be able to access the Galileo GDS via an application downloaded from the Apple App store onto a mobile device, or by using a web browser,” she explained.
