The platform conceived by the Majorcan company Portbooker, with the collaboration of Travelport, will be operational in April 2014. Already now all the ports and marinas in the world can consult their booking codes on the website of unimarina.org.
The launch of the GDS Unimarina, developed jointly by the Majorcan company Portbooker and Travelport, has given us an opportunity to get a glimpse of how the ports and marinas will be managed in the future. We are on the threshold of a new era within the nautical industry worldwide, the products and services accessible now with the help of the latest technology and with the strict quality controls typical of the sector.
The development of the marine GDS (Global Distribution System) means a revolution comparable to the one in the aviation sector. In 1953, the president of the American Airlines and the commercial director of IBM happened to be seated next to each other on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. They had a visionary conversation resulting in an idea to create a data processing system that would allow a globalized sale of airline tickets. Nine years later, in 1962 the first system, called Sabre, was installed in the IBM 7090 computers. If the system managed to process 84.000 daily telephone calls then, today the technological advances allow the leading GDS like Galileo of Travelport to reach the capacity of 40.000 messages per second and more than 1.200 million routes per day.
Following the example of the aviation industry, Unimarina has registered a standard codification for all the ports in the world, using the database of the Portbooker.com, the worldwide leader of online reservations of berths. The Majorcan company, which received the SSIS prize given by the IE Business School for global businesses younger than 10 years in the category of products and services, and an ICEX (Spanish Institute of Foreign Trade) success story, has launched the project with the help of SEGITTUR and with the collaboration of Travelport in order to make transactions of products and services between ports and marinas easier. This way, the booking of transit berths, yacht charter, long term berths, refit and maintenance projects, boat sales and transport of materials and nautical equipment will become easier, quicker and more secure for the clients.
Jorge Velasco, the CEO of Portbooker, and Pedro Anguera, responsible for Travelport, emphasize an important characteristic of the Unimarina as an open platform which will allow any port to "connect" with operators that comply with their established criteria when it comes to the quality of service and security.
News by ABC.
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