Viewdata Replacement Rolls Out

TOPAS and TORIX, the two new data standards which have been developed to eventually takeover from viewdata, are now in regular use within both the UK and Irish travel industries. According to the Travel Technology Initiative (TTI), under whose auspices t

Published: 31 Jul 2005

TOPAS and TORIX, the two new data standards which have been developed to eventually takeover from viewdata, are now in regular use within both the UK and Irish travel industries. According to the Travel Technology Initiative (TTI), under whose auspices t

Implementations of the standards include TUI-owned major Irish operator Budget Travel and Thomas Cook which is using the standards for its Neilson and SunWorld Web sites.

For Budget Travel, technology suppliers Anite and OpenJaw have developed a TORIX based solution that has allowed the tour operator to incorporate an advanced holiday search engine into its Web site. The system which uses OpenJaw’s xRez Internet Booking Engine and xDistributor XML Middleware has resulted in a year on year increase in Web sales of over 3000%. Without TORIX, this would have been impossible to achieve.

Similarly Thomas Cook’s technology supplier RWA has used TOPAS to gather pricing and availability data for its Web sites and then provide a real-time booking capability with TORIX. RWA regularly processes TOPAS-compliant data feeds from Thomas Cook’s TOS reservation system. It blends the price and availability data for each tour operator with the tour operator’s brochure content which is loaded into RWA’s Sell-It Reservator product, and then displays the combined information on the www.neilson.co.uk and www.sunworld.ie web sites. This is then booked using the TORIX XML message set. Mark Foy, Head of IT Service Delivery for Thomas Cook Tour Operations commented, “Using the TORIX and TOPAS industry standards means that we can deliver new capabilities to our businesses far more quickly and easily. When we considered the Neilson and Sunworld Ireland projects we were able to factor in our existing TORIX and TOPAS capabilities and this had a significant effect on the Business Case - both in terms of cost of delivery and time to market. Thomas Cook looks forward to further leveraging this capability over the years to come.”

Tony Allen, Chairman of TTI stated, “Both TOPAS and TORIX are now live and proving their worth in the field. XML is the technology of today and I confidently predict that both these new standards will continue to roll out, eventually replacing viewdata as it becomes increasingly difficult to justify its continued maintenance.”

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