October, 2008
US State Government Fares
US State Government fares were released in May for Sabre and Apollo users. These fares are now available to Worldspan users.
Qualified US State employee travelers can request and purchase State Government fares using a Preferred Passenger Type Code, which can be enabled by a RESX Administrator. These fares have special requirements, and travelers must set their air search criteria to return unrestricted fares by ensuring the Accept Penalty Fares is NOT selected (checked). Contact your Travel Administrator today for more information and setup instructions if you qualify for these fares and would like access to them!
Unused Tickets
Holding onto partial or complete unused airline tickets costs your Company money! In most cases these unused tickets have value and can be used for future travel. RESX can now display all of your available unused tickets empowering you to make more informed choices when booking a new air reservation.
A new Alert type has been implemented on the Air Home page and in the Alerts menu advising of the unused tickets you have on file. The Alert on the Air Home tab will allow you to see how many tickets you have; what Airline(s) they are on; how much each ticket is worth; and when each ticket expires. The Alert in the main menu will appear when you have one or more unused tickets expiring within 30 days.
Your RESX Administrators have the ability to upload all unused tickets available to you, whether or not they were ticketed through RESX. Simply log into RESX and view your list of unused tickets. Be sure to select one of the unused ticket carriers for your new air reservation and send for Purchase. Depending on your agency's requirements, you may need to email or send a note at time of purchase advising you would like to use your unused ticket towards your current trip.
August, 2008
Hotel Shopping Enhancements
We understand that shopping for a hotel is an important part of your travel planning process, whether it's business or leisure. A big part of this process is being provided a list of hotels that meet your personal needs (location, amenities, membership affiliations, room type, etc,) while still meeting the requirements of your corporate policy. This release will now make this process smarter and easier for all your future hotel bookings.
RESX will now return up to 10x more hotel options that match your request city or address (including Reference Point). These options will be filtered through RESX logic to ensure that your defined search parameters (Search Radius, Preferred Hotel Chains, Hotel Name, Minimum Crown Ratings, etc.) are all considered in creating a 'qualified' list with as many possible hotels to choose from.
Because so many MORE HOTELS are being returned, we urge you to utilize the hotel search parameters. This will allow your results to be returned more quickly and save you time from viewing a list of results that are not of interest to you.
Tips for searching for hotels
- Airport Search
When searching by airport, be sure to visit your Search Radius setting. For example - Searching for hotels from LAX with a 20 mile radius may return up to 200 options. If you know you want to stay near the airport, we recommend you reduce this setting to 2-3 miles. - Search by Address or Reference Point
Searching by address or reference point may provide a more defined list of hotel properties that better match your desired location than an Airport search returns. Be sure to set your Search Radius setting to the maximum number of miles you want to be considered. - Search Radius
As the examples above reference, the Search Radius setting is one of the most important determinations for filtering the list of hotel results to ensure the offered hotel properties are within your geographical parameters. RESX uses this value and determines which of the properties found in the hotel database and the GDS are within the defined square miles (or kilometers) of the address or airport of your request. - Preferred Chains
If you know you only want to select from specific hotel chains, you can limit your results by selecting up to three specific chains from the dropdown list (Limit Preferred Chains) in the Hotel Travel Preferences. You may choose up to three. You can either save these to your profile, and they will be automatically considered for all hotel searches, or you may select these chains each time you search for a hotel. Note that this setting will filter out all other hotel chains for your search location except company contract hotels as defined in your corporate travel policy. - Exclude Chains
If you know there are certain hotel chains you do not want to consider, you can remove these from your results by selecting up to three from the dropdown list (Apply Excluded Hotel Chains) in the Hotel Travel Preferences section. You may choose up to three. You can either save these to your profile, and they will be automatically considered for all hotel searches, or you may exclude these chains each time you search for a hotel. - Minimum Crown Ratings
When available, the hotel database associates a Crown Rating to each hotel, which is displayed as "Rating:" and between 1-5 Crown icons (
). This rating is listed on all hotel pages. Based on your preferences and company travel policy, you have the ability to filter out hotel properties that do not meet your minimum rating standard. This setting is listed in your Hotel Travel Preferences as:
"Only display hotels with crown ratings of X and up".
Note: For more information on Crown Ratings click the "Ratings" hyperlink next to each hotel property for a detailed explanation of this grading system. If the hotel database does not contain a rating for a specific property, RESX will display this value as 'Unknown' and will not filter it out as part of this option.
Note: All of the above parameters are controlled by company policy. You may or may not have access to these parameters. For more information, contact your travel administrator.
Trip Authorization - Authorizer Names in Alphabetical Order
With more companies utilizing the Trip Authorization functionality with a greater number of Trip Authorizers, we have updated this list to sort in alphabetical order. To simplify the Authorizer selection process, this list will now display by Last Name, First Name, and Middle Initial.
Trip Research Controlled by Company Policy
In an effort to continually provide a flexible corporate booking engine that meets all of your company's needs, we have added policy control to the existing Trip Research functionality. This control will allow your company to continue your ability to utilize the Trip Research functionality or to restrict it for some or all users. If this functionality is removed from your site, your existing trips in the Trip Research section will no longer be visible. The Save as Trip Research button will also be removed.
Air Option Results with Better Time Matches
When searching for lower fares, enhanced logic has been implemented to return flights that more closely match your originally requested departure or arrival times. This 'time' enhancement may produce alternate results from what you are used to seeing based on market and availability.
** If your travel agency is on the Sabre system, this enhancement is not included for this release.
SWABIZ Integration (Southwest Airlines Corporate Booking Tool)
In the last release RESX announced the integration with Booking Builder, a third party vendor that provides access via a web interface to all Southwest fares. This release provides updates to this functionality.
RESX will now recognize and support requested cities that have alternate airports that are supported by Southwest Airlines. For example, if you request DFW-DCA (Dallas Fort Worth Airport - Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport), which Southwest does not fly, RESX will translate that request to DAL-BWI (Dallas Love Field - Baltimore Washington International Airport) to return the option to view available fares to this market via SWABIZ.
This release also includes the support of One Way and Multiple Cities requests. RESX supports all available routes as supported directly on the SWABIZ site. Note that certain routes are not supported by SWABIZ and therefore not supported by RESX. These include 'Open Jaw' (Dallas-Miami, Orlando-Dallas) and 'Circle Trip' (Dallas-Miami, Miami-Orlando, Orlando-Dallas) type routes.
May, 2008
Trip Authorization - Advance Purchase Notification
A NEW conditional approval trigger is now available via the Trip Authorization process. This new condition provides the ability to initiate the Trip Authorization process for trips booked within a policy-defined advance purchase minimum requirement. The number of days is configurable by your RESX Administrator. This enhancement allows your company to better monitor travel policy compliance and ensure that trips are being booked far enough in advance to secure the lowest rates for travelers.
US State Government Fares
US State Government fares are now available to shop and book! Qualified US State employee travelers can request and purchase State Government fares using a Preferred Passenger Type Code, which can be enabled by a RESX Administrator. These fares have special requirements, and travelers must set their air search criteria to return unrestricted fares by ensuring the Accept Penalty Fares is NOT selected (checked).
Contact your Travel Administrator for more information and setup instructions if you qualify for these fares and would like access to them today!. These fares are currently supported for RESX Users on Sabre, Apollo and Galileo only, and functionality for other GDS's will be deployed in a future RESX release.
March, 2008
Trip Authorization
The Trip Authorization policy is more flexible than ever! New conditional approval triggers have been added to accommodate trips with total air cost exceeding a defined fare amount. In addition, RESX now provides similar approval triggers for maximum defined thresholds for Rail, Hotel and Car.
August, 2007
Amtrak Rail Bookings
You may now book and cancel Amtrak rail reservations directly through RESX. In the case of short-haul trips such as Boston to New York City, you can price and reserve Amtrak without placing a call to your travel agency. Simply select the RAIL tab on the Travel home page and enter your desired dates and times. The system provides the best available option for your date and time parameters for the class of service you requested. You may search alternate times and fares using the RAIL SCHEDULES tab. You can also include car or hotel reservations with your Amtrak itinerary. U.S. Federal Government contracted rates are available to shop and book within RESX for those of you with access to U.S. Government rates and fares.
Enhanced Trip Reservation Synchronization
The synchronization of your offline travel reservations (reservations placed or changed directly with your travel agency) is even better than before! The ability to automatically synchronize all of your travel reservations has been enhanced, providing one central point of access through RESX for the most updated and reliable information.
Multiple Airfare Display
RESX now provides an easy way to view and compare multiple available fares for a single airline itinerary. Given the myriad of corporate and travel agency negotiated fares, web-fares, promotional carrier fares, government discounted fares, unique penalty levels to name a few, you may be faced with viewing the same itinerary multiple times in a single response with a different fares attached. For ease of selection, RESX now clearly identifies these itineraries during the shopping process. For qualifying itineraries, you can click a link to view a fare comparison matrix, which lists each available fare for the selected itinerary and the specific fare type. This will you save time and effort when choosing the fare that is best suited for your travel purposes.
Preferred Airlines by Market
The ability to bias, or designate, an airline as a preferred carrier has been significantly expanded. RESX now provides an enhanced set of parameters which can be used to bias air availability responses for preferred carriers within the system, based on specific markets and through the weighting of fare values. You may see more air itineraries with Preferred Carrier icons as a result of this enhancement. This function allows your company to help you make decisions when booking air travel that may improve the overall negotiation power with preferred vendors.
Electronic and IT Accessibility Standardization (Section 508 Compliant)
Functionality was implemented for alternate text labels for most RESX Travel Profile fields. These alternate text labels can be used by alternative assistive technologies (e.g. JAWS) to verbally read the application to users with disabilities such as visual impairment. This functionality is part of a phased approach towards enabling a section 508 compliant user interface to provide users with disabilities full access to be able to complete reservations and update profiles in RESX