Three CRS companies namely Abacus India, Amadeus India, Galileo India and Air-India which market Sabre systems in India will now work togeher under the new umbrella to provide a regulatory framework to the operations.

Announcing the launch of the forum at a press conference here on Friday, Air-India director (national marketing) Jitender Bhargava said this was the first time since its inception in 1994 that the CRS companies have come together.

It has become difficult to detect the exact booking profile of a flight due to ``bogus practices'' prevalent in the CRS market in India. With the new body planning to take a series of steps, the current practice of flights going with vacant seats will come to an end, he added.

With travel agents using the incentive route on a large scale, the number of fictitious and duplicate bookings increased. The local airline officials found that they were saddled with large bills pertaining to CRS costs due to the billing of these bogus segments, he added.

This has led to the inconvenience to the traveller as seats would be displayed as booked, when actually they were available, he said.

The first attempt to regulate the CRS market in India was made on January 14, 1999, followed by another round of discussions on the subject on July 2, 1999. The agreements at the meetings, however, did not transalate into action at the ground level and a new agreement was worked out on January 24, 2000. The agreement envisaged a stricter monitoring of the non-productive bookings made by the travel agents.

Over the last five years, each of the CRS companies, through their national marketing and distribution companies, have provided travel agents with travel technology and service support free of cost including personal compauters. The four companies together have made substantial investments. Amadeus India is the largest player in the market and the total market size is about 12 million bookings.

The press conference was attended by Emmanuel Philip of Abacus India, Ankur Bhatia of Amadeus India and Raja Natesan of Galileo India.