Asked & Answered: Airline Merchandising and the GDS

For several years, Amadeus has been developing a retailing platform on the Amadeus GDS on which airlines can showcase products that make them stand out in the crowd, from luxurious first class personal space to clever packaging of amenities and services.

David Doctor, director of airline and travel agency distribution for Amadeus, talked with Travel Market Report’s Michèle McDonald about the technology side of the current debate over airline merchandising. The two spoke at Horizons, Amadeus’ biennial conference for its airline customers.

When we spoke at the Horizons conference two years ago, you were about to roll out the new retailing platform. Where does that stand?
Doctor: The pop-up descriptions of products that an agent sees when mousing over a flight and the banner ads that promote airline products that are relevant to the agent’s search are now live. And we recently introduced an electronic catalogue of ancillary services offered by airlines around the world.

How do you collect that information?
Doctor: We get a feed from ATPCO’s OC filing. [Airlines file fares with ATPCO, which then distributes them to GDSs and other distribution points; the new OC filings are for optional services]. From there, it’s resident in a database in Amadeus. We also can pull data from the airlines.

How does the catalogue work? Does an agent have to pore through a lot of information to find out what is available on a given flight?
Doctor: Not at all. It is not only an airline-specific catalogue, it is a flight-specific catalogue. It will deliver only relevant information – information that relates to the selected flight. Agents don’t have to have a fantastic memory about which flights offer wi-fi or which provide food for sale.

A couple of U.S. carriers have talked about linking their ancillary services and products to their customer segmentation data, so that they can deliver a highly personalized offer to the traveler. They say the GDS companies have not demonstrated that they have developed the means to do this. Would you say that is a fair assessment of the situation?
Doctor: I can understand that vision, that we have to learn about the shopper before presenting the product. It’s all about the execution. The baseline technology is there. You have to agree on what information to collect and how to collect it. This is why you need technology standards. Standards don’t restrict what you can do, they just tell you how you are going to communicate the information. Everyone has to agree on what those standards are, and there are a lot of different interests around the table.

You also recently launched an electronic miscellaneous charges document – the so-called EMD – with Finnair. ARC has said that it will be ready to roll out the EMD on this side of the Atlantic next month, enabling U.S. agents to sell and track ancillary services. But there is some concern that the airlines themselves are not ready to supply the necessary data to make the EMD work. It’s all very muddled. Do you have any sense of where things stand?
Doctor: Do you remember how long it took to get to interline e-ticketing? The EMD is exactly the same kind of situation. The airlines need an EMD server on their side. We have a product we can sell them, and it’s the same price as an e-ticket server. Of course, they can also go to other IT providers to get it.

OK, here’s a bonus question.  Amadeus has been fairly quiet during the debate over how airlines’ ancillary products should be distributed. American has said it will distribute them through agencies only via direct XML connections. Travel agencies are concerned about the inability to determine the “true cost of a trip” due to unbundling and rebundling of fares. Has Amadeus consciously avoided the drama?
Doctor: We can connect any way you like. We can do Java, XML, whatever. Again, it’s simply that the standard needs to be defined. As for staying out of the debate, isn’t it better to be getting things done than to debate them?