The Overhead-Bin Wars

The Overhead-Bin Wars are coming as airlines intend to squeeze revenue out of this storage area for passengers' carry-on bags.

In The Middle Seat Terminal blog, Matt Phillips outlines how US Airways recently altered its boarding procedures to give priority boarding to travelers who purchased Choice Seats.

US Airways says that these passengers, who purchased aisle and window seats in the first few rows of coach, will get to board in Zone 2. Of course, Dividend Miles Preferred customers get first dibs on free access to Choice Seats and exit-rows seats.

So, this is what the new boarding roll-call looks like at US Airways, and aren't most airlines' boarding procedures beginning to look like a caste system?

The order, according to Phillips, is first-class passengers, pre-boarding for passengers with kiddies or who need assistance, elite-status passengers, travelers with US Airways-branded credit cards, and then Choice Seat buyers.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The last group of passengers to board are the rabble -- you and me -- who just booked an ordinary coach seat.

Of course, with US Airways charging $15 for a first-checked bag and $25 for the second, the boarding priority that gives star treatment to what I'll refer to as the new elite, means they will get first crack at storing their luggage, laptops, strollers and jackets in the overhead bins.

And, that leaves Joe and Susie Traveler battling the new elite for any leftover space in overhead bins by the time their seat is finally called for boarding.

Oh, it's going to get ugly. There will be plenty of scrunched up jackets, crushed souvenir packages, and carry-on luggage bound for baggage check-in because of the overhead-bin squeeze.

And, with airlines, Amadeus and ITA Software testing optional services feeds , one of the things on some airlines' agenda is to charge for such premier access to overhead bins.

You know, pay $10 and reserve your overhead bin. That's coming, for sure.

If there is a revenue opportunity out there, count on the airlines to try to exploit it.

Me to Ryanair: Don't Print This or I Will Bill You

If it were another joke or public relations buzz-attempt from European low-cost carrier Ryanair, it might be amusing.

But, Ryanair's decision to scrap airport check-in counters and to charge passengers exorbitant fees for -- are you ready? -- boarding passes, is ridiculous.

Among the highlights, or lowlights from my perspective, Ryanair will be charging their customers about $14 for online check-ins, and if would-be passengers -- i.e. people who bought airline tickets -- show up at the airport without boarding passes, the airline will charge them $55 each for "reissuing" the boarding pass.

And, of course, the idea of customer service is so yesterday. Ryanair won't have airport check-in counters, and will opt merely for bag-drop-off areas.

This, of course, is all in the name of reducing distribution costs and upping revenue from what used to be known as optional services. However, boarding passes somehow don't fall into the "optional" category.

Let's remember: Ryanair is the airline that recently floated the idea of charging passengers to use the toilet, in what the Travolution blog termed a Pay-to-Pee policy.

The Web-check-in fee amounts to a booking fee, and Ryanair now counts itself as one of the few airlines that tack on booking fees.

The policy is outrageous. What about some elderly people and even the younger set, who might not be computer-literate?

Has your printer ever run out of ink, making it impossible for you to print a boarding pass?

Or, what if you are traveling or booking at the last minute and can't get to a printer?

All of these scenarios might make you susceptible to the $54 per person boarding-pass reissue fee at the airport.

Let's see, for a family of four, that's $216 for boarding passes.

I have this to say to Ryanair: Don't you dare print this blog. I just happen to be in the cantankerous mood to charge you a $70 fee for that privilege.

Of course, discussion about Ryanair's plans to deep-six airport-ticket counters takes place as airline executives huddled up in Miami over the last few days for the Airline Sales Channel and A-La-Carte Pricing conference, where you can bet Ryanair's policies were watched closely.

I previously came up with a very reasonable idea for this conference, but reliable sources tell me that conference organizers failed to heed my advice.

Ryanair is going about creating new revenue streams in all the wrong ways. Instead, the airline should treat its passengers as customers, and not try to gouge them with fees for services that previously were free.

I hope there is a public outcry about Ryanair's policies and that the airline is forced to flush them down their dreamed-of paid toilets.

GDS Full-Content, Twitter Metasearch, Southwest, Expedia, TripAdvisor

Some random, but hopefully logical thoughts, about travel distribution issues on a Friday morning [EST].

GDS Full-Content and Social Media: I've written in Travel Weekly how GDS full-content is a sham these days, given the airlines' full-throttle approach to introducing optional services. Although the airlines are testing filing these products with ATPCO, many of these services are still the exclusive offerings of airlines' websites.

So, it occurred to me that Twitter, too, already is further disintermediating the GDSs and travel agencies, or at least giving airlines a speedy and effective tool to go direct to their customers. The number of special fares and promotions that you can find on Twitter, with the airlines funneling consumers directly to their websites for inventory that often is unavailable in the GDSs, is numbing.

Twitter Metasearch: And that brings me to Twitter Metasearch, an application that a developer somewhere already must be fine-tuning. In the social media realm, we already have ExecTweets, a service that aggregates the tweets of CEOs and other C-Suite executives.

So, someone should create an application to aggregate all of the promotions and special offers on Twitter by industry vertical.

We might call the travel vertical on Twitter, TwitYak or KayTwit. You choose.

But, an aggregation of airline and other travel promotions like Priceline's now-ended $50 hotel-coupon offer and Connect by Hertz's one-year free membership offer for Twitter followers, would be a winning proposition.

Southwest, JetBlue, United: Speaking of airlines, some obviously understand social media and others are in the early stage and are coming up short. In her podcast on the IAG Blog, social media consultant Susan Black reminds me of an anecdote that Southwest founder Herb Kelleher recounted at the recent TravelCom conference in Atlanta. Kelleher said Southwest indeed is active on Twitter and sees it in part as a customer-service vehicle.

He said Southwest has seen a drop-off in the number of customer complaints to the Dept. of Transportation because Southwest has been able to deal with these issues directly with customers through Twitter.

Meanwhile, I took a look yesterday at JetBlue's tweets and compared the volume to those of United Airlines, which admittedly has dabbled with Twitter only since mid-March. JetBlue had 11 tweets yesterday, and United had a mere 14 in total since March 18. C'mon United. Jump in! This is an opportunity to improve the image of your brand, which could use some improving.

Expedia: Here's some interesting information about Expedia as it assesses what do about the $6 million per month impact from its eliminating or reducing, respectively, its air- and hotel-booking fees.

Expedia's booking-fee nixing terminates at the end of the month, and most people think the online travel agency will extend it.

It turns out, Expedia tells me, that its points of sale in Germany, France, New Zealand and India, as well as sister company Hotwire, also offer flights sans booking fees. Expedia.de in Germany eliminated its air-booking fees in April, although Expedia says the actions by its global points-of-sale did not take place in the context of a broad, coordinated initiative.

Well, according to Expedia's latest 10-Q filing, it gets 15 percent of its global revenue from airline tickets and 60 percent of its total revenue from transactions involving hotel sales. So, it is easy to see why eliminating the fees on air is less of an issue for Expedia than trimming its hotel fees, a move it made in reaction to an Orbitz initiative.

And, in the SEC filing, Expedia notes that it is trying to diversify its offerings beyond air and hotel by expanding its "car rental, destination services, cruise and other product offerings."

For years, online travel agencies have been bent on diversifying beyond air and into hotels, and now the pressures are coming to bear on the hotel business, so Expedia, at least, is looking to more fertile pastures.

It indeed would be ironic if analysts start berating the OTAs in the coming years that they are too dependent on the hotel business.

And, Expedia also concedes, in a way, a point that Forrester Research analyst Henry Harteveldt has been hammering home as of late: That the OTAs have fallen down on innovation, with each almost resembling a clone of the other.

Expedia states: "Differentiation among the various website offerings has narrowed dramatically in the past several years, and the travel landscape has grown extremely competitive, with the need for competitors to generally differentiate their offerings on features other than price. Newer competitive entrants such as “meta search” companies have in some cases been able to introduce differentiated features and content compared with the legacy online travel agency companies..."

Notice that Expedia refers to "the legacy online travel agency companies." I haven't heard that term used before in reference to the OTAs.

Are the OTAs getting to be "old school" with the metasearch engines and companies like TripIt and TravelMuse passing them by?

TripAdvisor: Part of Expedia's diversification efforts include hitching its star to TripAdvisor's global media business.

In the first quarter, the revenue of TripAdvisor, which just launched in China, grew 19 percent to $86 million. And, its OIBA (Operating Income Before Amortization) climbed 36 percent to $48 million.

With those kind of margins for TripAdvisor, this seems more like a Fat Tuesday than a random-thoughts-Friday.

Travel Metasearch, OTAs Sweating the User Interface, Stupid

When it comes to the new availability of optional services data for the airlines' fee frenzy, the travel metasearch engines and online travel agencies (OTAs) are sweating the user interface (UI).

How do you cram the options into search choices and displays when checked-bag fees may be suited for apples-to-apples comparisons among airlines, but in-flight entertainment choices or paid seats may not?

The challenges for Kayak, FareCompare, Mobissimo, Farecast, TripAdvisor, CheapFlights and the OTAs is how to present a clean UI to consumers that would entice them to pick their optional-services preferences before they execute their search so travelers can take advantage of the new data without the metasearch engines and OTAs totally messing up the UI.

There also still is a technology debate, I'm told, concerning whether the new ATPCO standards are robust enough for airlines bent on those incremental revenue streams that optional services will generate.

Although 13 global airlines, ITA Software and Amadeus made some travel news by testing optional services' feeds with ATPCO, some carriers undoubtedly will build their own nonstandardized solutions, as did United Airlines, Midwest Airlines and Frontier Airlines with the Sabre GDS before ATPCO had completed its standards-crafting.

The GDS UI issue can be easier and more complex than the problem for the metasearch engines and the OTAs. On the one hand, putting optional services on green-screens and in the hands of travel professionals might be easier from a display perspective. On the other hand, the GDSs need to jump through hoops to make all this work with their legacy technology.

Meanwhile, there was an interesting debate yesterday in the comments section about my post, "Airline Optional Services: TripAdvisor, Kayak, Farecast, FareCompare, OTAs to Get the Data."

Hudson Crossing and Valyn Perini of Open Travel Alliance fame cast doubt on whether many consumers will choose to shop for flights based on optional services choices.

A very legitimate point.

But, the more I think about it, the more I think that the issue is a chicken or the egg kind of question.

I think if the metasearch engines and OTAs succeed in creating clean, compelling UIs out of this admittedly morass of optional services choices, then a significant segment of travelers will take advantage of the choices.

That's because it is in consumers' interests to know what they will be paying for in advance, especially if the airlines are offering any new services that actually add value.

On that point, I like the comments yesterday in my blog by Sam Shank, the CEO of Dealbase.com.

Shank wrote: "I've long felt that if a la carte products are positioned as upgrades (vs. add-on fees), and strategically-placed within the purchase decision process, they'll represent a key new source of airline revenue. Metasearch, with their focus on innovation and rapid iteration, is the logical partner for airlines to roll this out to consumers."

He added: "As an air traveler, I'm looking forward to spending more money to have a better flight experience. But, if the only products offered are things I used to get for free, my wallet will remain shut."

Mine, too.

Airline Optional Services: TripAdvisor, Kayak, Farecast, FareCompare, OTAs to Get the Data

Before the end of 2009, metasearch engines powered by ITA Software, and online travel agencies (OTAs) and airline websites pumped up by Amadeus and Travelport, likely will get the optional services data necessary to transform the flight-shopping process.

As I reported in Travel Weekly today, more than a dozen airlines, ITA Software and Amadeus are testing airline-fed data through ATPCO for services like checked bags, Internet access, premium seats, lounge access, onboard gin and tonics, and even portable oxygen. Travelport GDS, too, says it will get the feeds by the end of the year.

This bit of travel news is huge.

Here's why:

ITA Software is part of the metasearch guts behind Farecast, TripAdvisor, Kayak and FareCompare, and it also powers Hotwire and a host of airline websites, including Continental's and United's. These metasearch sites use ITA to get fare, schedule and availability data so they won't have to scrape airline websites and get into new legal scrapes.

And, Amadeus powers some of Kayak's and Expedia's global sites, as well as ebookers, Opodo and LastMinute.com. Travelport GDS, including Worldspan and Apollo, provides booking engines for Orbitz, CheapTickets, Priceline and many others.

With standards for optional services in place and ATPCO finished writing the code and transmitting the data to ITA Software and the GDSs by the end of the year, the way travel agents and consumers search for flights will be transformed.

A bit of the complexity in flight shopping will get simplified.

So, if enough airlines go ahead and agree to file their optional services information and the metasearch sites and OTAs take advantage of this data bonanza, consumers would be able to shop for flights by preferences.

Travelers would be able to search for flights, for instance, that offer pay-as-you-go exit-row seats, lounge access and Internet service and compare these to flights that offer similar services.

Metasearch engines that don't offer these apples-to-apples comparisons in their search-results grids, could use the data to enhance transparency in their fee-translators, such as TripAdvisor's Fees Estimator.

And, the OTAs could come up with similar solutions, although access to the same standardized data from the airlines doesn't mean that all the displays will be identical.

Access to the data is just an enabler. There is plenty of room for innovation, and at least one prominent metasearch site is working on its unique solution as of this writing.

OK, shopping for flights still will be complex and a pain in the butt, but access to the optional-services data at least will be a major step forward in navigating the fog of helter-skelter service offerings.

Next on the docket, the airlines and ATPCO will be working on filing data on branded fares, or fare families, but that is stage 2 in the process, and probably won't get implemented until 2010.