Farelogix, a key partner in American Airlines Direct Connect, says it was going to withhold a video challenging the motives of Sabre and Travelport in biasing the airline’s flights in GDSs after learning that peace broke out Jan. 24 between Sabre and American.
However, Ask the Question 8 found its way to YouTube Jan. 25 a little while after Farelogix saw the “chain letter” Sabre emailed to customers urging them to keep pressure on American Airlines over its Direct Connect initiative, says Farelogix CEO Jim Davidson.
In the video, Davidson questions whether Sabre’s and Travelport’s actions were geared to help travel agencies, consumers or the GDSs themselves?
He also questions why Sabre, which made it difficult to book the airline’s flights in the GDS, didn’t bias American Airlines’ flights on Sabre-owned Travelocity, speculating that — contractual obligations aside — perhaps Travelocity stood to gain from the absence of American Airlines’ flights on Expedia and Orbitz.
Here’s the video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2igKkdz4DI
Note: There’s a new wrinkle to Farelogix’s Ask the Question video series — a Full Transparency Statement. Among its many provisions, Farelogix states: “Farelogix receives no outside third party, industry, coalition or customer compensation or sponsorship for the development and distribution of any Farelogix publications and presentations.”
That’s an apparent dig at several industry coalitions opposed to American Airlines Direct Connect. The funding sources of these efforts have not been disclosed.
GDSs practice “Disinnovation”
Since airline deregulation permits airlines to differentiate their offerings by cost or by quality, and since the newly independent GDS companies promote fairness by permitting seach-by-cost (lowest to highest, mostly), airlines have sought to tease (some would say “trick”) shoppers with low low fares which included limited price availability, advance purchase restrictions, weird routings, long connections, odd departure or arrival times, and really crummy seat assignments. Millions of people every month played the system to fly below the airline’s cost to carry them. Billions of dollars were lost.
Soon airlines sought to lower their already low “shopper’s” fare further by shifting some of their costs. Travel agent commissions disappeared. Costs like meals and baggage and seat pitch were peeled off of the base fare and sold as optional add-ons. Airlines thoght no reason to pay for every frill that had built up during regulated air travel if the passenger was willing to go without it.
Soon the dizzying array of extras overwhelmed simple teletype and EDIFACT message restraints (designed in the 1940s and the 1980s). XML emerged in the 1990s with the flexibility of the internet and was made an international standard by 2002.
Rather than junk their giant investments in legacy message processing and the commodity air pricing of regulated times, GDS companies struggled to adapt to airline product differentiation and airline branding trends. Most resisted change and clung to the way that had always handled passenger air travel even as airlines changed that experience and product utterly. Airlines added creativity and complexity, some of it even good. None of it easy to retrofit into the GDS business technology.
Computing prices fell. Message bandwidth rose. HTML and XHTML became irresistible to airlines and their hosting operations. While hardly threatened with extinction, GDS companies needed to change direction sharply toward the future and reinvest in business process reengineering and to add incremental processing power. While doing so, they collectively initiated a rearguard effort to discredit airlines’ own limited innovations in internet usage. I call this refusal to move forward GDS’ “Disinnovation”, marked by its partner “Disinformation”.
The GDSs have some choice words to spew before they get down to the hard stuff (work): Some about XML and other “Direct Connect” methodologies:
“Axis” vs. “Allies”. What’s next, Manhattan project?
“Costly”
“Irrational”
“Dangerous”
“Fragmented”
“Unproven”
“Opaque”
“Unfair”
“Deceptive”
This sort of inflammatory language, even if true (it’s not) shouldn’t take the place of informed, reasoned discourse.
Come on, let’s have a “sputnik moment” and embrance the future.