TravelMole Interview: Peter Muller, TelMe Online

Travel agents, GDSs and technology companies are increasingly competing with each other says TelMe Online managing director, Peter Muller.

Mr Muller told TravelMole: “We do compete with the GDSs to a certain degree, but we have a good relationship with them. Obviously the GDSs like us, and we like them, in so far as many of their customers are our customers. So a GDS will often recommend us to work alongside them. There are going to be customers who will choose a GDS product over ours – but ours is more expensive and more sophisticated. It is aimed at a different customer.

“But, yes, GDSs will increasingly become our competitor, and a competitor of the agent. Look at Sabre buying Travelocity – over time they certainly have indicated, I believe, that they would like to become the principal.”

TelMe Online provides technology solutions to agents and operators. Mr Muller cites his competitors as firms like Datalex, Dataflex and GetThere. The company offers a number of products including Farebase, a shopping mall for UK consolidators, and Ticket Window, which is an online reservation system featuring tools like File Fare Ladder. This allows agencies to automatically price a net fare below the lowest published fare in a search, so it comes up as the best option for the traveller.

TelMe has 45 staff based in various offices in the UK, and counts First Choice and Unijet among its operator clients. It also works with some of the large business travel houses and consortia like Advantage – whose Focus4Fares is driven by TelMe.

Mr Muller sees one of his key products at the moment as being the GDS Manager, which allows business travel agents to have a relationship with and search with more than one GDS at a time, including using more than one GDS in a single booking. He calls it a super-PNR.

He said: “We can work with one or many GDSs, which is important should deregulation go ahead – so some fares will be available on some GDSs and not on others.”

“We think the Farebase portal will come into play because it is one portal for multiple fare searches – a product we are actively encouraging agents to use. Our aim is not only to offer an integrated search for net, published and negotiated fares, but also low cost fares.” At the moment TelMe’s low-cost airline search is a separate screen-scraping tool.

“We think agents are being clever in the way they utilise technology to give them a competitive advantage and enable them to charge service fees. The thing that agents can offer people that they can’t get at home is the time saving and the choice of products.

“In 30, 40 or 50 years time perhaps the vast majority of people will book online but that won’t happen as quickly as people think. There are still a couple of generations who won’t book online. It will be a long period of time before we are agent-less.”

Read previous TravelMole Interviews:
09-Oct-2003 TravelMole Interview: Fiona Jeffery, Reed Exhibitions
03-Oct-2003 TravelMole Interview: Dinesh Dhamija, ebookers
26-Sep-2003 TravelMole Interview: Keith Webber, Telewest Travel
18-Sep-2003 TravelMole Interview: Jaime Puig, Sol Melia
17-Sep-2003 TravelMole Interview: Jill Chalmers, All-Hotels.com