BookingBuilder Genie Overview

BookingBuilder Genie is a very powerful and exciting new product from BookingBuilder Technologies. It is a revolutionary concept in point-of-sale quality assurance and management of preferred suppliers.

BookingBuilder Genie installs on your desktops and allows you to display messages and take other actions based upon GDS activity, web browsing, and date/time. For example, whenever an agent looks for flights from the US to anywhere in Europe, it can display a message with travel advisories. If an agent books flights to a country where you have a partner offering inbound services, it can launch their website so the agent can proactively give this information to the traveler. If an agent opens a supplier website, it can display a message reminding the agent that the supplier can be booked in the GDS.

How It Works

The application runs in the background and very intelligently monitors the GDS. It uses our patent-pending GDS Trak™ technology to understand what the agent is doing, and it then creates "events". When it creates an event, it takes the basic information from the GDS and then signficantly enhances that from our own databases. For example, if an agent enters a flight availability request from NYC-LAX on 15JAN, the GDS command has only these three pieces of data. We enhance that by showing the country for each airport, the continent for each airport, the mileage between the airports, and other information. The product then raises the "Flight Availability Command Sent" event with all of this information. This allows you to offer products that are specific to a country, track travel between specific countries and continents, etc.

Since it is intelligently tracking the GDS, it recognizes and understands hotel reference availability commands as well as non-reference commands, and the events are the same. The events are also the same across all supported GDSes, so if you have more than one GDS, you can create a single prompt and have it apply to all of them.

In addition to the GDS tracking, it allows you to monitor web activity and to display message or take other actions at specific times. For example, you can display a message 5 minutes before a company-wide conference call reminding everyone to call in.

Process Flow

We use specific terms to describe each part of the process, so we'll start with those. The first term is Prompt. You can create as many prompts as you want, and each prompt starts with an Event, and then has Actions that are performed when the Conditions are met.

Various activities taking place on a computer result in Events. Events include Flight Availability Command Sent, Browser New Domain, Date/Time, GDS Response, and others. When an event occurs, you can apply Conditions to it.

For example, whenever an agent enters availability from the US to Canada, you might want to display a message reminding the agent to inform the traveler about passport requirements. The Conditions would be "Begin Country Code equals US and End Country Code equals CA". When the conditions are met, you can perform Actions.

Actions include displaying a Notification Window, launching a web browser, starting another application, opening a document, settings fields in a web browser, and others. For example, if an agent enters availability to LON on the last Monday in August, you can display a Notification Window with the message that it is the Summer Bank Holiday, and you can also launch a web browser to a site with more information on this holiday. You can perform as many actions as you want within each prompt.

You can also assign actions to notification windows. When you create a notification window to be displayed, you can create buttons and links within the window. When a button or link is clicked, or the window itself is clicked, you can perform as many actions as you like. For example, you can create a Lookup Table that lists the dates of each holiday in each country, and also contains the URL of a website with information on each holiday. Whenever an agent looks at flights, your prompt could cross-check the destination and date against the lookup table. If there is a match, you could display a notification window telling the agent that the flight conincides with a holiday, and display the holiday name and country name in the notification window. When the window is clicked, you can then launch the website with more information on that holiday.

Lookup Tables are a very powerful part of the product. They work like spreadsheets, and you can create as many as you want. In the above example, when you find out about a new holiday, you simply add it to the lookup table; you don't need to create a new prompt or modify the other conditions.

What other products is this like?

To help understand what can be done with this product, many people want to know if there are similar products. The answer is very simple: There has never before been a product like this! In the past there have been "highlighter" products, but they could only do a tiny part of what this product does. With those, you would have to create complex patterns to match information on the GDS screen, and then you could display a message. For example, if you want to remind an agent to book a certain airline in an availability response, you would have to create a pattern like "annaannnlllaaaaaa". With our product, you simply select "Flight Availability Response Received", and then select "Airline List Contains" and enter the airline code. There has never been a product that combines our power and ease of use at the point of sale. This list highlights some of the ways this product is completely different from anything that has come before:

• Highlighter-type products require you to create complex expressions. We have simple events and conditions. (Yes, we also allow you to enter patterns to match information in any GDS command and/or response, but in most cases you'll just use our events.)
• If you want to use a highlighter-type product to remind agents about hotels in 40 locations during two date ranges, you would have to create 80 "highlights" with complex patterns. Double that if you want it to work with two GDSes. With our product, you create one Prompt and a simple lookup table, and it works on all GDSes!
• Highlighter-type products only see characters on a GDS screen. All the information is out of context. Our product intelligently understands what is happening in the GDS, so everything is "in context" and you can quickly and easily create prompts without requiring any complex patterns.
• Our product also allows you to prompt based upon web activity and date/time.
• All configuration of our product is done via our configuration website. You can create groups of the computers in your company, such as corporate and leisure, and have separate configurations for each group. The software on each desktop automatically gets its configuration from our web server, so you don't have to copy configuration files. No matter how many offices you have, all you have to do is go to our website and create your prompts once. This is a very important feature for all companies with more than one location.
• We have numerous messages styles so you can display different kinds of information with different message styles, and you can truly tailor the product to your style of doing business.
• Our product has many actions it can perform, such as launching websites, reading data from a browser and entering it into the GDS, reading a GDS profile and copy certain parts of it to the clipboard so you can paste that into Word, etc.
• Our notification windows support any combinations of text and styles, fonts, colors, and justification. You can right-justify text in a local language that is read from right to left, for example. You can mix sizes, fonts and colors, and even have blinking text. You can also include buttons and links, which can each perform as many actions as you want.

As you can see, this product is nothing like anything that has come before. It truly represents a revolution in point-of-sale capabilities, and has established an entirely new product category -- it is an intelligent desktop assistant. The power comes from the ease of use, and by leveraging the data in the GDS with our own enhancements to allow you to create the kind of conditions that have never before been available.

For more information:

• Click here for a list of great examples of how this product can be used to help you make more money and better satisfy your customers
• Click here for examples of the kinds of notification windows that are available
• Click here for a list of the events that are available
• Click here for a list of the actions that are available
• Click here for documentation on how to create Prompts
• Click here for documentation on how to create and maintain Lookup Tables

BookingBuilder Technologies
PO Box 112
Mahopac, NY 10541
845-234-4440 Fax: 212-202-7914
E-mail: info@bookingbuilder.com