Car Connectivity

OpenJaw's advanced travel distribution products provide the perfect XML standards based platform for delivering innovative car solutions. xDistributor, OpenJaw's XML middleware platform provides connectivity to multiple inventory sources including Global Distribution Systems and direct connects to car rental companies and intermediaries. The xRez Internet Booking Engine provides unrivalled flexibility to deliver car searching and booking capability with fully inclusive car rental rates direct from the suppliers.
For flexible searching against car rental location data from multiple sources, OpenJaw can also provide a searchable rental location content database with import applications for many car rental company data formats.

xDistributor

Manage and aggregate inventory from multiple Car inventory sources using the industry's most advanced XML standards based technology. Simultaneous search against systems including:

• Direct Connects to car rental companies
• Global Distribution Systems
• Car rental intermediaries
• Car rental websites

xDistributor provides a single OpenTravel™ Alliance XML interface to any combination of these systems. OpenJaw's advanced business rules engine controls which suppliers receive particular requests, how the responses are aggregated and other business logic functions including sorting, filtering, removing duplicates, applying markups or discounts. xDistributor provides the capability to 'burst' multiple requests in parallel against each supplier system, with business rules determining the options in each request. This allows large amounts of data to be gathered to support availability checking against multiple suppliers, or to drive additional search requests when too few cars are found for the users exact search criteria.

xRez

xRez delivers advanced technology for car rental websites. The combination of XML based architecture, advanced customer-centric features and unrivalled flexibility provides a platform to grow your business and adapt quickly to changing market requirements.

Search Options

xRez offers multiple search types to allow accurate matching of customer needs:

• Geo Search - find car rental locations within a given radius of a particular search point. Within a large city, allow the user to choose multiple city areas.
• Search by Address - enter an address and find rental locations within a given radius of that address.
• Search near airport or city - enter an airport code or city name and allow the user to retrieve rates for cars at that location.

Sort Options

To better meet customer needs, xRez allows search results to be displayed using multiple sort criteria:

• Sort by Distance - order rental locations by distance from the search origin, showing the distance in miles or kilometres from the search point
• Sort by Price - By utilising xDistributor's bursting capability, accurate rates can be retrieved from multiple vendors. These results can then be sorted by price
• Sort by Rental Company, Car Class etc. - sorting based on any standard information available for each car

Mapping Support Service

xRez supports integration with mapping services to display interactive maps showing one or multiple car rental locations.

Standards

xRez supports the travel industry XML specifications developed by the OpenTravel™ Alliance for Air, Car and Hotel searching and reservations. Other XML formats can also be supported on request.

Architecture

xRez is part of OpenJaw's end-to-end XML product suite for travel distribution. It fully leverages the capabilities of the latest Java, XML and Web Services technologies. The xRez architecture is highly scalable and fault tolerant and can be deployed on Windows, Linux, Unix or Solaris.

Content Database

In many cases, a local database containing car rental location and descriptive information is desirable for advanced search and content management purposes. Most car rental companies allow downloading of descriptive content for their supported locations and car types. This allows the website owner to manage and update car rental information to ensure consistent display of content from multiple sources, translate data where required and allow searching and filtering of car types or rental locations based on any content in the database.

An OTA XML interface for searching and retrieving descriptive content from the database is provided.