Ancillary Fees: Coming Soon to Your GDS (at Last)

It’s been a long time coming, but the pieces are finally coming together to enable travel agents to book, purchase and track airlines’ ancillary services in the GDSs.

Travelport and Amadeus announced full-content deals with Frontier Airlines that include the distribution of ancillary services. Sabre Travel Network unveiled a similar agreement with Air New Zealand, a pioneer in airline merchandising.

Two essential pieces of the puzzle have been ready to go for some time, but airlines and GDSs needed to adopt them.

The first is ATPCo’s technical standards for optional services (OS), which enable airlines to file their ancillary product and fee information to ATPCo, which in turn distributes them to GDSs and other outlets. Carriers such as Frontier and Air New Zealand have begun using the OS standards.

The second is the Airlines Reporting Corp.’s EMD – Electronic Miscellaneous Document – which enables travel agencies to collect and track fees for ancillary products and services. It has been ready to go since November.

Tracking a trip’s true cost
The EMD will make life a bit easier for travel agents’ corporate clients, as it allows them to determine the true cost of a trip without having to wait for the expense report to come in.

It also will provide a “proof of purchase” for travelers. Say, for example, a customer purchases an upgraded seat but her flight is canceled and she is rebooked on another flight. The EMD will show that she is entitled to an upgraded seat on the new flight or to a refund if the new aircraft cannot accommodate the request.

There is movement on the EMD front as well.

Sabre is the first GDS to be certified for the ARC EMD, a process that requires some testing of links but is not overly complicated, according to ARC. Amadeus certification is scheduled to be completed in the coming weeks.

ANZ kicks it off
“By leveraging industry technology standards developed by ATPCo to file airlines’ fares and ancillaries and IATA’s standard to fulfill purchases via EMD, Air New Zealand will offer its first ancillary for sale through the Sabre GDS,” Sabre said. 

The first ancillary fee Air New Zealand will make available to Sabre agents is pre-paid bags. The carrier plans to add other products and services over time.

Meanwhile, selected travel agencies are currently testing the solution.

Travelport said Frontier will subscribe to the GDS company’s merchandising products, enabling the carrier eventually to offer Travelport agents the option of selling upgrades to the carrier’s Stretch extra leg room seating through the standard desktop, to be followed by Branded Fares.

Travelport will integrate the merchandising capabilities into the Travelport Universal Desktop, which is slated to go live with Flight Centre soon.

Amadeus’ agreement with Frontier also calls for the distribution of the carrier’s complete range of publicly available inventory and fares, including “desirable ancillary services such as the carrier’s popular Stretch seating choices.”