Wednesday's Travel InsideOut

Navitaire, which accommodates instant fare updates by JetBlue, AirTran and Spirit Airlines, among others, has been raining on the Airline Tariff Publishing Co.'s parade. So now, ATPCO and its major airline customers, are striking back.

Travel Weekly: ATPCO to boost fare updates from three times a day to 15: Beginning in November, the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. plans to dramatically increase the frequency of its fare updates domestically and internationally.

ATPCO, the primary fare-data collector and distributor for the travel industry, sent a notice to subscribers that it plans to transmit domestic fare feeds 15 times per day in the U.S. and Canada, a 400% increase over the current three feeds, and to blast international feeds on an hourly basis. Read more

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Put down your BlackBerry or iPhone for a second, or don't if you are reading this on your aforementioned PDA. I don't need to tell you that mobile is coming into its own. Last week, I referenced Hyatt running concierge services through Twitter, and now Hilton has launched a mobile-booking tool.

HotelMarketing.com: Hilton launches innovative mobile booking solution: The new solution has full booking capability, offering travellers the convenience to select and book a hotel, access and change bookings and view hotel images and information, whilst away from their PC. Read more

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Will it be called Troogle, as Stuart MacDonald tweets, perhaps tongue in cheek, or will Google's next step in travel be refinements of apps like City Tours and Flight Links? What kind of trip is Google on in travel?

Dennis Schaal Blog: Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0: With Google’s recent introduction of City Tours and Favorite Places, speculation is rife that Google will 1) enter the travel market, 2) launch an online agency and become another Expedia, or 3) develop or acquire a metasearch engine to compete with Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Read more

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Wall Street has keen interest in whether United Airlines -- and the airline industry -- can be successful in off-loading credit-card fees to travel agents and consumers.

BusinessWeek: Fee Fight: United Airlines vs. Travel Agents: As U.S. airlines seek to cull every last cost from their operations, travel agents are gearing up for what one agent calls a "battle royal" over a recent decision by United Airlines (UAUA) to pass along credit-card processing fees to 28 travel agencies. Those costs, which amount to 2% to 3% of the price of an airline ticket on average, are currently paid by airlines as part of the ticketing process. Wall Street is eager to assess whether United's move will prove successful, given that shifting such costs to agents and fliers could represent billions in savings across the industry. Read more

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Marriott International faced its financial challenges in the second quarter, and continued a drive to cut costs and benefit the environment through a sustainability program. Some companies realize that green will mean more green.

The Street.com/Reuters: Marriott Aims for Eco Friendly Hotel: The Marriott Hotel chain is focusing on greener accommodations in effort to meet the demand of environmentally conscious visitors. View it

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Here is Alex Bainbridge's enlightening, yet somewhat contrarian view on travel industry brand management and social media.

Musings on Travel Ecommerce Blog: Brand is what people say when you are not in the room: I love this quote via @hugoburge @craignewmark @jdlasica [yes I try to source everything correctly!]

"Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room." Great quote… but comes down to 2 key definition issues:

• Who is in the room?

• What happens if you never leave the room? Read more

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The financial industry, too (and not just us), has a love-hate thing going with the airlines.

The Motley Fool: Bumpy Earnings Disrupt Airline Investors: The airline industry would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. Check out these two headlines:

• "Airline stocks up after United's quarterly profit"

• "Airline stocks fall after Continental's report"

You'd have found both at MarketWatch yesterday, posted just hours apart. How's that for irony? We love you, airlines! Wait. Read more

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Most online travel companies are attempting to drive bookings online and getaroom.com is trying to push phone bookings? What is the proper balance? A U.K. travel agency is experimenting with an answer.

Travolution Blog: Is hi-tech shop design enough for retail travel agents?: Coop Travel is the latest to unveil its vision of the future with its two concept stores.

The seamless joining together of shops, call-centres and website is the Holy Grail everyone is chasing to make best use of existing shops and their related overheads and the more cost effective online distribution - if you can get consumers to convert. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

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.