Beyond Viewdata

time links to their reservation systems for last room/seat/cabin availability. Bookings can be immediately confirmed and there isn't even any need to pickup the telephone-unless, of course, you need information that isn't there, or the viewda-ta system is working so slowly that booking over the phone is actually quicker. The fact is that viewdata has descended from a previous era: BPC-Before Personal Computers. It was introduced at a time when equipping a travel agency with PC's was not an option. The PC's available had but a tiny fraction of the power available today and, in any case, were very expensive. Buying four PC's to go on front office desks would probably have cost more than a complete shop refurbishment. The only high-tech option then was a viewdata terminal. However, times have moved on and viewdata has some serious limitations when compared with today's technology. Its speed of data transfer is eight times slower than even the slowest modem you can buy now and nearly 100 times slower than the fastest modems. It is also limited to displaying just 25 lines of text, each just 40 characters long. A PC can fit so many characters on-screen that they would be too small to read long before any limitation was reached. It is quite clear that we should be using the power of our PC's and one recent development does so. Viewdata polling systems were on show at the World Travel Market. They automatically scan price and availability from many viewdata systems and hold information in an agent's PC database. This is a great time saver because the agents can then quickly check their own databases rather than logging onto four or five host systems. However, viewdata is still needed to check real-time availability and make the actual booking. A development a few years ago that was unsuccessful was the GTI initiative which would have used EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) as the basis of a view-data replacement. EDI is computer to computer messaging. It's fast and efficient but, due to its very nature, I believe EDI is unacceptable. This is for the simple reason that tour operators and other principals would have no control over the manner in which the information contained in their EDI messages would be displayed on-screen. Can you imagine Heinz or Kellogg's allowing supermarkets to decide how the wrappers should look on their products? An important issue with …