With more sophisticated Internet search technology as well as social media websites, developing travel technology for frontline agents has gotten a lot more complicated. You need systems that can keep up with the increasingly advanced tools used by your clients.

For many years Virtuoso, the luxury travel marketing group, has been recognized as being at the forefront of technology in the travel consortia space. For example, Virtuoso was the first to mandate that each of its agent members have a fax, and the first to create its own Intranet. As its legacy systems began to age, Virtuoso recognized that it needed to improve its technology tools to provide its frontline travel consultants with better information.

Two years ago Virtuoso launched an effort to build a new technology platform that it dubbed “Composer.” That effort, led by Scott Ahlsmith, Virtuoso’s executive vice president of global technology, focused on developing a completely new system for Virtuoso’s travel agent members, suppliers and customers. But Composer has been slow to roll out, chiefly because technology overall has been changing with the advent of more sophisticated search technologies and social media tools.

In August, at Virtuoso’s Travel Mart in Las Vegas, Ahlsmith finally unveiled the features of the long-awaited Composer, which is effectively a social network for frontline Virtuoso consultants that lets them search for the right trip for the right client, discover information about products and destinations, and communicate with each other as well as with Virtuoso suppliers. Roughly 8,000 Virtuoso travel consultants, many of them home based, are now on Composer after a rollout period that began at the end of April. Ahlsmith expects eventually to have about 12,000 users on the system in its first version. Virtuoso also is launching an iPhone application so agents can use Composer while traveling.

Ahlsmith says Composer is much more than just a typical transaction-based website in that it promotes collaboration, content and collective knowledge through a global network. “We built it for where the travel industry is going to be,” he says. “Progress has been slow, and we drove over a few potholes, but we never stopped and we never gave up.”

Composer works much like Google in that you can search by destination and travel product within the system and get a virtually instant return with a list of hundreds of responses, including news and promotions. You can then filter that list based on what you’re looking for specifically or for your client’s preferences.

Composer’s dashboard page has been designed for frontline advisors. Indeed, Ahlsmith points out that much research went into creating just the right interface to make it highly intuitive and interactive.

The platform also delivers information on each Virtuoso Voyager Club sailing, including cruise line, when the cruise departs and what Virtuoso amenities are included. You can view maps and pictures of the destination. You can find shore excursions and add them to itineraries. All searches can be saved on a “working” page so you can create itineraries, save them as PDFs and then email them to your clients.

Composer also is designed as a contact management system. Users can connect with anyone in the Virtuoso network, from staff members to other Virtuoso member agents to Virtuoso suppliers. It will eventually have more sophisticated profiles for Virtuoso member agents. Today the system just displays contact information, such as phone, email, fax and mailing address.

Ahlsmith emphasizes that Composer is a process. That’s why the platform is still being developed and will never really be a finished system. “The long-range vision is that if you look at most travel technology it’s booking-centric,” Ahlsmith says. “The booking is really important, but the real value is in the transactional data which allows you to predict and recommend what the next travel experience should be.”

Later this year, Composer is expected to roll out new features designed to help profile clients, deliver travel alerts to traveling clients, build itineraries, and market specific travel offers to customers. Eventually the system will be built to capture client transactional data, see people’s travel purchase patterns and then turn that back into a recommendation for future travel. “That’s the real secret sauce to what Composer does,” says Ahlsmith. @

For more general information on Virtuoso, visit www.virtuoso.com.

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