SOPHISTICATED GDS systems are making life easier for airline travellers, friendlier for travel agents and more lucrative for the airlines.
A good example is Sabre Travel Network’s Branded Fares, which allow airlines to bundle fares with merchandising and upsell opportunities by having different fares and fare family attributes reflected on their systems.
This is promoted to travellers shopping online or agents shopping on behalf of travellers via their agent desktop.
Customers can pick and choose, balancing price with comfort and convenience; agents have more attractive and diverse products to sell while airlines can differentiate and sell airline seats, services.
It also allows rule breakers such as allowing customers on non-changeable fares to make one time changes without a fee, and a range of travelling options to various customer segments across various channels in a consistent manner.
Shopping across fare families allows shoppers to selectively choose attributes, such as the ability to select and separately pay for, better seats in the airline cabin.
Sabre Travel Network incorporated Sabre Branded Fares into its GDS for launch partner Qantas Airways in August last year. As a testimony to how this way of selling, which started in Australia and New Zealand has grown, the tools to support this fare family selling methodology have now been broadly introduced across the entirety of the Sabre-connected travel agency channel in Australia.
In Australia, Qantas can now package and brand a variety of fares featuring different products and services. And by displaying its fares in all channels Qantas has capitalised on its marketing efforts while simplifying its fare structure. This set of tools is also being introduced for Australia’s corporate travelers to selfmanage via Sabre’s Get There solution.
Hans Belle, vice president of marketing for Sabre Travel Network, said the feature significantly enhances an airline’s product branding and consistency across channels to the benefit of travel agencies and the end consumer.
The feature offers multiple price points each with a unique set of ‘fare family’ attributes or inclusions that are individually inventory controlled on each flight according to demand. Sabre is providing a tool for Qantas to very surgically manage the content in a crosschannel fashion, allowing them the ability to segment the marketplace and tweak their fare family offering, as necessary, to both traditional agents and corporate travellers.
An agent only has to look for the lowest available fare within the chosen ‘fare family’ - an approach now employed by numerous airlines around the world. Qantas can now clearly differentiate its fares and competes on value rather than on price alone.
Sabre points out that through its solution, airlines can clearly communicate attributes that differentiate their products from competitor products, while also providing insight to travel agents on the differences that exist within an individual airline’s fare products through the travel agency channel.
This allows Qantas to ensure that the traveller doesn’t merely select the lowest fare, if that product isn’t the best for them, but instead “sells up” into more premium products that are clearly differentiated from lower fare products.
Qantas has recognised the significance of the new technology– and how to adapt it to produce the best results.
Speaking at the Amadeus Horizon 2008 conference in Bangkok, John Lonergan, Qantas general managerdirect channel, said that online had become more about servicing than selling for his airline.
“It is better for us not to sell online but to service online,” he said. “Servicing online is not about reducing costs – it’s about the right content to the right customer at the right time.”
In another move that is expected to be welcomed by travel agents, Travelport - one of the largest GDS businesses in the world through its Worldspan and Galileo brands - has launched the Travelport Carbon Tracker, an advanced post-booking reporting tool designed for travel agencies and corporations to address the growing demand to measure and report carbon emissions as part of a sustainable travel programme.
The Travelport Carbon Tracker combines industry- standard compliance reporting with an advanced calculator that uses operational data and a range of key variables to deliver more sophisticated emissions analysis.
In contrast to many existing carbon calculators, the Travelport Carbon Tracker is not directly linked to specific “offsetting” programmes and is designed for use with multiple Global Distribution Systems (GDS).
Jeff Clarke, president and CEO of Travelport, said carbon measurement was a relatively new and emerging science. “Research is still needed to improve on the accuracy of data gathering, calculation and reporting solutions.
“Our aims in launching this tool are to give the industry access to the latest and most improved ways of measuring emissions for business intelligence; to encourage debate and collaboration in terms of emissions benchmarking; and to enable corporations to make informed decisions for sustainable travel as part of their overall travel policies.”
Sabre Travel Network’s GetThere, the leading online corporate booking tool, has a sustainability initiative of its own, GetThere Green, available to GetThere users in any GDS. Among GetThere Green’s capabilities is the ability for corporations to designate air, auto, hotel and rail suppliers as a “Green Partner” within the shopping process.
Dynamic messaging through GetThere Green allows companies to share anticipated emissions between city pairs or point to sustainable suppliers and/or properties in a given destination.
