ABTAnet Offer
This information was mailed to all ABTA member head offices on 22nd February 1996.
Updated 18th June 1996 - Price reduction.
ABTAnet Offer
This information was mailed to all ABTA member head offices on 22nd February 1996.
Updated 18th June 1996 - Price reduction.
ABTA has reached an agreement with Unipalm Pipex for ABTA members to take Pipex Dial, at a special rate of £149.50 p.a. plus £19.99 for the initial software package. This represents a saving of 16% on Pipex's standard price of £15 per month. In addition ABTA has negotiated a 'bonus month' for the first year giving subscribers 13 months access for the price of 12.
There are over 60 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the UK. When ABTA began looking for an Internet Service Partner, five factors were considered to be most important:
At present, there are a number of reservations services aimed at consumers available over the Internet, for example British Midland's scheduled air booking service, and some US CRS-Gateways such as PC Travel and Internet Travel Network. These services are likely to expand in the future, and will be used for agency access, but at present most Internet sites offer information only:
Destination Information is improving rapidly, and will be valuable for travel planning. Having access to 30 million plus international consumers is proving a powerful motivation for destinations to provide information, but finding this information and using it effectively is not easy for the consumer. ABTA members who are destination specialists are likely to build their own expertise here, and add value to the consumer.
Competitor Information. As more companies advertise on the Internet, an awareness of your competitors' offers will be increasingly important. Companies without Internet access are increasingly likely to find that clients quote them offers they have seen on-line.
General Information on health, visas, weather and so on is also available.
ABTAnet subscribers will be provided with a 'Bookmark' file facilitating access to a number of information sources of direct interest to the travel organiser. In this way, companies accessing the Internet for the first time will benefit from the research put in by ABTA and ABTECH in the past months.
The opportunity is for the travel organiser to become the focus for on-line travel information. By dealing with information every day, rather than once or twice a year as the consumer does, the agent or operator can ensure that he remains an important part of the booking process. Knowing more about the product than the customer will continue to be a key factor.
Pipex Dial comes complete with a dedicated mailbox, and email software. Email can be a very cost effective way of communicating overseas, especially across time zones. Its advantage over fax, apart from the much lower cost, is that data can be captured for onward use in other transactions (for example for rooming lists).
Describing an email culture to companies who do not use email is difficult. But email is likely to be a standard way of communicating in the future, in the way that fax is now.
You do not have to switch to Pipex Dial to take up the ABTAnet publishing options described below. If you have just taken out a subscription with Demon, EUnet, or one of the other ISPs, you may have paid in advance for a year's access and wish to continue using this ISP. In this case you may still take up the Standard Option (see below) for ABTAnet Publishing. Your pages will then be hosted on ABTAnet's secondary server in the US, rather than on Pipex's DialSpace server in the UK.
If you subsequently switch to Pipex Dial, as we would recommend, your pages can be moved at no cost.
Minimum Recommended System Requirements are:
You can dial into the nearest Pipex node wherever you are in the UK. Pipex Dial does not limit your access to one specified node, as is the case with some ISP's dial services.
