America West Enables Online Hotel, Rental Car Booking.

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Author: Meehan, Michael

The breakneck pace of technological innovation in the airline industry continued last week as America West Airlines Inc. unveiled a new home page that allows customers to book hotel rooms and rental cars when they buy plane tickets online.

Meanwhile, St. Paul, Minn.-based Northwest Airlines Inc. signed a $5 million deal with BEA Systems Inc. in San Jose to provide technology that should ultimately eliminate the green-screen terminals used by its booking agents.

Airlines have recently begun to add to their Web sites the capability to make hotel and other types of reservations. Forerunners in this space include United Air Lines Inc. and Travelocity.com, analysts said.

Bernie Han, vice president for planning at America West, said the airline has more than 100 information technology projects on tap. He declined to specify how much the Tempe, Ariz.-based company invested in its recent site upgrade.

"It seems the bar rises every day, and it's been accelerating in recent months," he said.

The new Web page also allows customers to create user profiles that will prevent them from having to repeatedly enter name, address and credit-card information to book America West flights.

The airline will then use the information to create customer profiles. "We're just starting to get a better understanding of who our customers are," Han said. "It's a powerful tool that we're just starting to utilize."

According to Han, America West plans to update its proprietary database to present information in a more userfriendly manner.

Meanwhile, the Northwest/ BEA deal will enable the airline to replace the traditional Westinghouse reservations terminals used by Northwest agents with browser terminals.

Jeremy Schneider, the company's manager of middleware services, said the BEA Tuxedo product will also be used as a messaging tool between the airline's legacy systems and its newer technology. "It helps get information through our firewall to our back-end system," Schneider said. He added that Northwest has systems dating back to the 1960s.

"We operate in a very mature Unisys environment. We have some functions that still use [IBM's Transaction Processing Facility operating system], and we use Worldspan as our reservations system, and none of it speaks to the other stuff," Schneider said. "There's a whole lot of linking going on."

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By Michael Meehan