It's coming.
Consumers will be able to make apples-to-apples comparisons of flights among various airlines that offer similar ancillary services with the fees included in fare displays during the research phase.
These fees will appear in fare-grid displays or in tools more comprehensive than TripAdvisor's Ver. 1.0 Fees Estimator.
You could start seeing some of this stuff before the end of the year.
Perhaps a bit later, the OTAs and metasearch sites also will get access to airline's fare families like Air Canada's Latitude or Tango fares or Frontier Airlines' AirFairs.
But, flight shopping will remain complex.
When a slew of airlines -- and this is coming too -- decide to opt out of offering products and services strictly on an a la carte basis and start bundling them into a hodge podge of new fare brands, it's going to be "very messy," one insider told me.
One step forward, two steps back.
7 comments:
I've no idea how the GDS's will be able to include such functionality within their mainframes... a lot of low fare shop processing is done outside the GDS but is then pushed back to deliver the information to the agent...
Edd: The GDSs will have access to the data. The airlines will provide it. How the GDSs decide to display it to travel agents will be an issue that each GDS decides. But, whereas now agents would have to go to an airline's website to pay for optional services on behalf of a client, within 6 months or so the data will be in the GDS. Some airlines will start providing that data. The capability will be there. Trust me.
Edd: One more thing about the GDSs. The GDSs are weaning themselves a tad off mainframes, but it still is their core and they will be disadvantaged in the way they display optional services. The advantage goes to ITA Software, which provides the guts of airfare searches on a lot of metasearch engines like Kayak and TripAdvisor.
It'll be fun to watch how booking engines adopt and adapt this new technology. I'll be counting on you to keep us posted. -SRK
Suzanne: I will have more on this in a few days. As they say, "stay tuned.":)
Dennis: Did you ever see the G2 Switchworks corporate booking tool demo the built to show off their merchandising capabilities? It was one of the best demonstrations of functionality I had ever seen. Do you know what happened to all of that?
Thaddeus: Travelport bought G2 SwitchWorks and TravelPort is incorporating some of these merchandising capabilities into a new desktop. I wrote a Travel Weekly story about that desktop, if you are interested. http://bit.ly/oXXdD
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