Published in Travel Agent

April 26, 1999

Tools of the Trade

A number of Web sites are looking to become the one-stop shop for agents on the Internet

By Michael Quinlan

Just as consumers have benefited from the explosive growth of travel-oriented sites on the Internet, travel agents too have become the beneficiaries of a new type of travel-related Web site: the travel agency portal. These business-to-business Web sites target agents as their primary audience, offering them a one-stop shopping experience for information, services, products and links that are uniquely tailored to the needs of the travel agency business.

These sites all hope to become the one Internet site on which agents depend. However, since each differs slightly in the type of services it offers, it is still sometimes difficult to find everything in one location. To help agents determine which sites best meet their needs, we've reviewed the top three agency portals. Following is an overview of what they offer.

BizProLink: Boca Raton, Fla.-based BizProLink is the newest agency portal. Unlike some of its competitors, BizProLink offers business-specific portals for 16 industries, with the travel agency industry being one of them. The idea for BizProLink was developed in 1994, when Microsoft started developing an electronic marketplace on its MSN network site. As MSN developed into a separate entity, the company that ran the hospitality portion of the initial business broke off to start its own portal site. It launched BizProLink in 1998; the agent section came online in February.

Steven Sponder, president and founder of BizProLink, says the site offers 5,000 links for its 16 different industries, but he does not have statistics on how many links are available for the travel section itself. Still, Sponder says that since its launch, the travel professional area has been "one of the more popular areas of the network."

Sponder characterizes the travel agent section of BizProLink as a specially tailored, time-saving search engine for agents. "You're not going to find horoscopes or chat rooms on our site. This is strictly business," he says. Some of the sites linked from BizProLink include third-party technology vendors, travel-related government agencies, agent attorneys, educational resources and industry event sites. The site also offers free E-mail, links to industry news from ASTA, links to travel books found on Amazon.com and connections to many other advertisers.

Sponder says BizProLink benefits from its experience offering portals for a variety of businesses. "We are a network of business-to-business communities," he says. "Here you're part of a network or community of other professionals. There are other travel professional sites out there, but they are really islands unto themselves. It's difficult for them to get out there and market themselves, because it's very expensive."

Sponder adds that the multitude of businesses in the BizProLink network helps attract more advertisers because many of the site's sponsors offer services that cut across professions. That advantage, he says, will eventually bring the site more resources.

Some agents who have visited the site say it is too formulaic, and offers little expertise or extra services specifically for the agent community. But Sponder says: "It's only two months old. We're getting new content added all the time, such as a new track called 'Community', which offers information on how professionals can participate in community outreach efforts. We're definitely growing."

PositiveSpace (PS): Perhaps the biggest agency portal site on the Web right now is PositiveSpace. The crux of the site is its directory of more than 1,000 links to agency-related resources on the Internet. Similar to Yahoo!, a consumer-oriented portal, all the links on the PS site have been manually reviewed by the company's staff to determine their usefulness to agents. Greg Merkley, President of Evanston, Ill-based Travel Technology & Magic, is the owner of the PS site. He took over operation of the site in February 1998, when it was known as "Hyde's Travel Agent Resource." He renamed it, and began upgrading its content and design. Over the past year, Merkley has added a daily and bimonthly E-mail news service for registered users, initiated monthly contests and giveaways, and set up a service called "Ask an Expert," which allows agents to send questions about their business to PS' panel of industry experts.

According to Merkley, PS has more than 4,200 registered users who work in the travel industry, with approximately 90 percent of those being travel agents. And the site's numbers are getting stronger every day. "We grew 10 percent during March and are seeing a similar growth rate so far in April," Merkley says. He notes that agents can find what they are looking for while avoiding the kind of irrelevant information found on other directories. Says Merkley, "Agents are busy and need more than a link with a one-sentence description. They want to know something about the Web site. Does it allow booking? Will there be a commission? How can they contact the suppliers, by phone, fax or E-mail? They can get that information from our directory listing."

He adds that another big plus for PS is its E-mail news services. More than 3,000 people subscribe to the bimonthly PS Connections newsletter (which includes feature articles meant to educate agents on various aspects of the industry) and the daily PS Inform news service (which provides breaking coverage of travel industry news). Although some PS Inform subscribers say the daily service can be a bit of an overkill, it is still the only site that offers such a service for free.

Merkley says he is planning to bring more interactivity and customization to both the site itself and its attendant services. "A customized PS Web site would display only certain categories of information, based on your preferences," says Merkley. "E-mail services would be customized so you only receive information that is relevant to your business and areas of interest. Thus we will be providing more specialized information as agents develop particular areas of expertise."

TravelManagement.com: In addition to offering an agency portal and search engine, TravelManagement.com offers its visitors a unique array of agent-specific resources. They include breaking news from Reuters, Business Wire, PR Newswire, ZDNet and stock quotes; links to preferred vendors; horoscopes; maps; weather; and online polls.

However, the TravelManagement.com site, operated by Steven Falk and Charles Brossman, was built around three principal services for the industry; job placement and recruiting, automated RFPs, and online benchmarking and statistics. Those services are available for free, directly off the TravelManagement.com site. Agents can post resumes and job listings, or search through the site's database of available jobs. The job-search engine allows visitors to look for positions by state, category or both. In addition, the site's interactive RFP tool lets corporate travel managers issue an RFP electronically for free, at which point the company's benchmarking tool can be used to determine whether the bids that it has received are competitive.

The site also provides agent-specific links in a number of areas, including educational organizations, travel associations, technology vendors, suppliers, travel agencies and destination management entities. Visitors can also sign up for a free electronic newsletter about the site, as well as a free E-mail account. In addition, TravelManagement.com offers a tool that provides access to legal information from travel attorney Alexander Anolik. Queries sent through the site are responded to within one business day.

While using TravelManagement.com's many services may initially be free, there are some costs involved. For instance, if an employer hires a candidate that he or she found through the site, the agency must pay a fee of 10 percent of the annual base salary for agents/reservationists and 20 percent of the annual base salary for all other placements. Vendors that participate in the company's interactive RFP system must pay a fee if they win an account through the service.

TravelManagement.com hopes to expand its listings of free services and information, along with the list of vendors featured in its shopping section. It also hopes to develop even more technology to automate the work of travel agents. The company says it hopes to "be recognized as the leader for travel resources and support service products."

Right now, with the number of agent-specific portal sites relatively small, the challenge for these companies is to increase their market share and develop products that keep agents coming back on a daily basis. In the end, competition may force some companies out of the business and bring new ones in, but the net result for agents will undoubtedly be richer, more useful Internet resources for their businesses. Still, agents must learn to make good use of these services. As BizProLink's Sponder notes, "We can provide all the tools in the world, but if the agents don't use them, they won't be worth anything."