Travelport barges in with nice niche for eWaterways

Travelport GDS signed a distribution deal with small-ship, yacht and barge retailer eWaterways, its first with a GDS vendor.

eWaterways, headquartered in London, sees itself as an alternative to big, mega-ship cruising, with its roster of 1,200 contracted river- and coastal-cruise ships.

The eWaterways small-ship inventory initially is slated to be available to Galileo subscribers outside the U.S. and Canada through the Galileo Leisure portal this month.

Subsribers to Travelport’s Apollo GDS in the U.S. and Canada are scheduled to get access to eWaterways cruises midway through 2010 in the Travelport Cruise & Tour platform. Revelex powers the platform, which integrates cruise and tour bookings through back-office systems.

If cruise bookings through these two Travelport GDS leisure platforms run true to form, then a large portion of these “electronic bookings” would be made via agent phone calls to eWaterways.

Meanwhile, Travelport has continued with its policy of making its cruise-booking platforms open to subscribers of its GDSs only, but I’m expecting Travelport — you heard it hear first — to open up some of its platforms to nonsubscribers.

Amadeus followed this agnostic path years ago with Web-based Amadeus Cruise.