The Packages

Its latest innovation is their Window 3.0 compatible Pro Minim 2.0. This allows an agent to make a series of bookings for hotel, car and air services at one go. For this, the company is conducting training and demonstrations programmes wherever they have clients.

Galileo is one of the largest CRS companies in the world, with a data bank in Denver, Colorado. The system is based on IBM and AMDAHL mainframes. These mainframes have the combined processing capacity of 1120 MIPS (million instructions per second) and its additional hardware provides 4.8 tera bytes of disk information storage which means 4.8 trillion individual characters of data can be saved in it.

 

In India, Galileo covers 550 locations in 29 cities.The company is eagerly waiting for the installation of the Billing Settlement Plan (discussed below) because it will give them the opportunity to market their Window Focalpoint 3.0, which, among many other facilities, will provide a ticket printing facility.

Unlike AMADEUS, Galileo has adopted a different strategy for marketing its products in which the focus is on bigger travel agencies like American Express, which can assure it a minimum amount of business a year.

ABACUS is the most recent entrant to the Indian market. The company is collaborating with Tata Consultancy Services and currently covers 180 connections, of which 100 are in Mumbai, 50 are in Delhi and rest 30 are in Goa, Pune, Cochin and Chennai (formerly Madras).

Their latest innovation is ABACUS WHIZ, a workstation that runs on Windows 95 and Window NT. By using this a travel agent will have the facility of making a booking at the click of a mouse. ABACUS Distribution System is going on-line with an Internet Website in September this year. And from1997 onwards ABACUS CRS will be running on the ABACUS Transport Network (ATN) by virtue of which users will not have to queue for the Sita network, the biggest network in India, which the other CRS companies are using extensively. Even though the battle between the CRS companies has not started yet, the demand for CRSs in India is quite inelastic. As K R Srinivasan, director, ABACUS, puts it, CRS is something like a newspaper. An agency sticks to a CRS that its employees are familiar with. The real battle, as the accompanying story shows, will begin when the Billing Settlement Plan is instituted.