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.

United's Fee Passalong Could Tilt Playing Field Back Toward Airline-Direct Channel

United Airlines' decision to test the waters and have some travel agencies foot the fees for credit-card transactions when selling United flights could conceivably tilt the airline-online travel agency marketshare-skirmish back toward the airlines.

As Tom Botts noted in the Hudson Crossing Travel Industry Insight Blog: "If adopted even more broadly and applied to the Online Travel Agencies, they would be forced to reinstate some sort of booking fee in order to cover the costs of paying credit card merchant fees. This would return a pricing advantage to the airline.com websites that has recently been removed by all of the major players in an attempt (which we have heard has been successful) to drive growth."

In fact, PhoCusWright financial analyst Jake Fuller, in his recent report, Does the Model Work Without Fees?, cited "indications of a mid-teens increase in air-transaction volume since waiving fees [in March and April] suggests a rise in [OTA] share to 37% and that OTAs would be able to offset at least some of the lost fees through volume."

Fuller pegged the OTAs' share of online-flight bookings at 32 percent in 2008, down from a peak share of 44 percent in 2002.

So if a bunch of major carriers follow United's lead on credit-card fee avoidance and the OTAs are forced to reinstate some form of consumer-booking fee to shoulder the new burden, then the increased volumes that the OTAs have seen in the last few months may evaporate as some consumers return to airline websites for flight-booking.

And, as Nadine Godwin notes in her Travel Weekly piece, United's initiative could drive more travel agent bookings to United.com, as well.

Godwin writes: "Alternatively [instead of agents absorbing the fees and booking United flights using their own merchant acounts], it could push agencies to book at the carrier's website rather than the GDSs, leaving United to pay credit card merchant fees but bypass GDS fees."

Travel organizations quickly are taking sides on the issue.

ASTA (American Society of Travel) has taken a dim view of the United plan and reportedly stated that it would be asking the Justice Dept. to monitor possible airline collusion on the issue since carriers have openly aired their feelings on the question of reducing credit-card fees for some time.

And Robert Joselyn, a prominent travel industry consultant, reportedly is urging travel agents to book carriers other than United as a form of protest to convince the airline to rescind its new credit-card policy.

After greatly reducing their GDS fees several years ago, many airlines identified credit-card fees as the next battleground in the drive to reduce distribution costs -- but United's is the first potentially game-changing attempt.

In a July 2007 Travel Weekly article, Al Lenza, then Northwest's vice president of distribution and e-commerce, said credit card fees were soaring and it was critical for Northwest to trim its "dependence on credit cards."

Lenza was the point man in Northwest's ill-fated drive in 2004 to have agents pay a "shared GDS fee" in an attempt to reduce Northwest's distribution costs. After vehement protest by travel agencies and the GDSs, Northwest withdrew the plan.

Lenza left Northwest in 2008 when it merged with Delta, and The Beat reported in February that he began working at United on distribution strategy.