In its latest Ask the Question video, Farelogix points to the seeming contradiction between Travelport’s praise of its direct-connect with Air Canada and vehement opposition to American Airlines Direct Connect.
As reported and as Jim Davidson, the Farelogix president, CEO and in-house bobblehead notes in Ask the Question 9, Travelport GDS hooked up to the Air Canada API, called AC2U, to access the airline’s flights, as well as inventory heretofore unavailable in global distribution systems.
Davidson questions why Travelport hailed the Air Canada initiative as an “industry first” yet blasts AA Direct Connect as “materially inferior…”
Actually, Kurt Ekert, Travelport’s chief commercial officer stated: AA Direct Connect is “simply an attempt by AA to push a materially inferior version of the value provided to travel agencies, suppliers and others in the travel distribution chain by the highly evolved and efficient GDS channel.”
Davidson muses about what he sees as a seeming contradiction.
Davidson points out that AC2U and AA Direct Connect are both based on the same Open AXIS Group XML standards, which were developed by Farelogix. [Farelogix is American Airlines' direct-connect subcontractor.]
What Davidson doesn’t mention is that Travelport has stated that the direct-connect controversy is not about technology.
“It is about AA wanting to gain additional control over distribution for its sole benefit and against the interests of consumer travelers and other key industry stakeholders,” Ekert has said.
In other words, American Airlines wants to usurp part of the role traditionally plays by the GDSs while Air Canada doesn’t appear to be taking that tack.
And, the issue is very much about economics.
Air Canada seems to be placing most of its focus on the additional revenue it can attract through direct-connect and GDS distribution, while American Airlines seemingly is putting more weight on direct-connect and reductions in GDS fees.
Here’s the Farelogix video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43uHtBBu7BY
The notion that the GDS’s are “unbiased” distributors has been shattered by recent events. Who knows what they are capable of doing for their “preferred” suppliers and against their less “agreeable” suppliers. Is their an external auditing process with these GDS’s? After all, they have shown they have the power to “drop-down”, with the flick of a switch, when they don’t like what a supplier is doing.
Tim –
all GDS have functionality used by agents to bias the display according to their (agent’s) contracts. A potential GDS decision to bias would be overridden by the agent policy. Only small agents without contracts don’t have policies and could be influenced by a GDS display bias, if any. Besides this, most agents are now simply using fare search functions which return best price first – hence again not much bias possible. The only impactful “bias”, if we want to call it like this, is to remove a carrier…
Daniele: Travelport apparently is building an American Airlines surcharge into the base fare, which means an agent searching for the lowest fare wouldn’t see it because of Travelport bias. So, GDS display bias does exist and it does have an impact.
That would be interesting to see. Is that a surcharge that Travelport would earn? That could mean a solution to the commercial problem.
It sounds complex at first glance – very curious to see how Travelport would price the surcharge for every fare family/route/class/interlining, who will maintain it, how it will work out with the BSP, how it will be presented to API partners, and all the back office reporting and invoicing…
What is clear from the Sabre and Travelport headlines/news of recent months is that these GDS’s do play favorites — and they have the technological power and the PR motivation to play favorites. As a result, the value that was created by them 50 years ago, as UNBIASED DISTRIBUTORS of flight and travel data, has been severely damaged if not destroyed. Public efforts to persuade their users (travel agents) to move for or against one carrier or another is proof that “unbiased” does not exist. In reality, the effort has been to injure one carrier over another. The tens of thousands of personnel required to operate an airline are, as a result, the ones most injured. All of this is done under these GDS’s guise of a deep concern for the industry. The GDS curtain has been pulled back during the past several weeks, and what is behind it leaves a lot to be desired.
For those who might miss my meaning. By technological “power”, I mean the power to move a carrier’s flights to the bottom of the search list (or even de-list), in the blink of an eye.
I don’t think you have made the case that GDS “play favourites”, at least not since UA and AA owned the unbiased(!) competing GDSs anyway! It’s fairly obvious that a GDS COULD alter a display algorithm – not really a technical problem – probably a legal one.
Most businesses would adjust product mix in whatever way they could to protect themselves from being disintermediated – why is a GDS any different? Isn’t the current hoo-ha just another manifestation of the broken commercial model in travel distribution?