United’s Dave Hilfman To MC Advocacy Dinner

Airline executives are not generally known for bringing down the house. Dave Hilfman, United Airlines’ senior vice president of worldwide sales, is the exception. 

At last year’s ASTA Global Convention in Washington, Hilfman appeared with his counterparts from American and Delta on stage, the first such event since the airlines capped, cut and finally eliminated base agency commissions. 

The GDS surcharge imposed by Lufthansa—a major partner of United—was the hot topic of the day, and Hilfman was asked for his take on the move. 

Hilfman noted that for U.S. agents, there were “ways to get around it,” including United’s code-share flights with Lufthansa. “Agents will do what they need to do,” he said, drawing a burst of applause that turned into a roar when he got up and danced across the stage.

At this year’s conference, Hilfman will serve as master of ceremonies at the sold-out ASTA Advocacy Dinner on Tuesday evening. 

Hilfman and his team are no strangers to travel agents, of course. Despite the bumpy years of the commission cuts, he has maintained that working with agents “is the right thing to do for our high-value customers,” both at United and at Continental, where he held the same title before the two carriers merged.

And he admires how agents have transformed their businesses to survive and thrive in the new era. “I think people are smarter and better at what they do,” he said. “The travel agency channel delivers the majority of our revenues and the highest margins. We focus on high-yield business traffic and also on high-yield leisure traffic.”

Hilfman is enthusiastic about the next phase for the airline-agency relationship: the growing adoption of IATA’s New Distribution Capability, a technical standard designed to take airline merchandising through intermediaries to a new level. 

NDC will alter things for the better, he said. It is working “beautifully, really taking us into the 21st century.” 

It will enable the industry to take all “the really cool things that have been done in consumer travel” and make them applicable to the business travel sector, Hilfman said. 

“I’m more encouraged than I ever have been about the state of the industry.”