The Web has permanently altered the way travel and hospitality organizations do business including hotels, airlines, and travel wholesalers. Using travel portals (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, etc) customers have become much more savvy buyers and have much higher service expectations. Customers can instantly compare prices and purchase across multiple airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, and cruise lines.

To compete and gain a competitive advantage, these organizations must leverage the Web and replace costly proprietary systems with standards-based technologies. Using MySQL travel and hospitality organization can:

• Deliver cost-effective personalized self-service applications to reduce costs.
• Improve customer service by providing highly-responsive, continuously available systems.
• Easily add valuable services such as delivering flight status alerts in real-time.
• Reduce operations costs by developing automated systems that replace manual processes.

Look to Book: A Guide for Online Travel Retailers »

The IT infrastructure that a large majority of Travel and Hospitality industry relies on consists of many legacy and home grown systems which are expensive to operate, not easy to maintain, and difficult to change. MySQL enables organizations to quickly modernize their infrastructure and build much more flexible systems by providing the following benefits:

• Easy to Use and Maintain - MySQL is recognized for its superior ease of use. The fact that users can get MySQL Server up and running in minutes rather than days, enables organizations to deliver applications much faster than with proprietary databases. Furthermore, MySQL does not require high cost administration skills to maintain.
• Cost-Effective - MySQL is well suited to run on commodity hardware and provides an affordable licensing model which significantly drives down the cost of technology. For example, MySQL has saved Sabre Holding millions of dollars over competing high-profile commercial databases.
• Core Component of LAMP - The open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) makes it easy for organizations to develop and deploy standards-based Web applications that are low-cost, high-performance, and easy to change. Using LAMP, travel and hospitality organizations have the flexibility to incrementally add new value added services. These services help organizations improve customer satisfaction and build loyalty in a highly competitive marketplace.
• Reliability & Performance - Web-based self service applications are becoming a requirement for airlines, hotels, and travel wholesalers to capture customer orders. With competitive offers only a click away, these organizations cannot sacrifice the availability and responsiveness of their systems. That is why they are turning to MySQL. For instance, the Travelocity online air shopping and pricing application use MySQL Server to manage over 3 billion fare combinations for a single customer request.
• Platform Independence - MySQL Server is available on over 20 hardware and operating systems so that organizations with a heterogeneous mix of computing environment can their leverage existing investment.

Sabre, Pivex, and Lufthansa are among the companies using the benefits of MySQL to revolutionize the way they do business.