Questions & Answers: Amadeus Exec Addresses Issues of Access, Transparency for Ancillary Services and Fees
by Dori Saltzman |
Airline ancillary services and fees are a hot-button topic with travel sellers these days, particularly in the business travel arena. To get a more in-depth understanding of the issues involved and their impact on your business, Travel Market Report sat down earlier this week during ASTA’s THETRADESHOW in Orlando to talk with Robert Buckman, Amadeus America’s director of airline distribution strategy.
We presented him with four questions submitted by our readers. Buckman addressed each one in depth and gave us his Big Picture perspective on how and why ancillaries are just the tip of the iceberg in what amounts to a paradigm shift in the airline industry and its distribution practices.
This week’s Questions & Answers installment covers issues of clarity and transparency surrounding ancillary services and fees, and covers how Amadeus is already involved in a pilot program with an airline in France that offers travel agents live access to sell ancillaries.
Question: “How can the airlines and/or GDSs guarantee clarity and transparency regarding ancillary fees, so that a client knows exactly what the cost of a trip is going to be before buying the ticket?”
— Submitted by Jerry Vaughn, president and CEO of Inspired Journeys Inc., Federal Way, Wash.
Answer: “The first step in assuring transparency of fees across a multi-channel environment is getting a commitment from the airlines to make that data available to points of sale outside of the airlines. The airlines have to be able to file that information so that customers can find it.??
The next step is for the technology companies in the pricing and distribution space to develop the systems required to support that data and bring it out in a very relevant and transparent way that allows either agents or consumers to see it on a comparative basis.??
We’ve been working on that for the better part of three years. As an industry, the standards have been defined. ATP* has lent its expertise in order to lay out the infrastructure to support pricing and rules necessary to distribute ancillary services. Today ATP can take data from the airlines for ancillary services and make them available to any external pricing system — any system out there that prices airline products. ATP last year rolled out a very robust distribution system for ancillary services called OC Record.??
Amadeus has developed a means to take this data on a real-time basis and incorporate it into a pricing catalog. We actually launched this in June in France, with an airline by the name of Corsair. Corsair now has the ability to sell its ancillary services to agencies through Amadeus — it’s live. So really, when you look at it, there are no restrictions. It just takes the commitment of the next airline to say, “I, too, want to go ahead and do that.”??
One of the issues is that there’s a catch for the airlines; if you are an airline that has an ancillary service, do you necessarily want to be the first to put your product out there, especially if the result in the display is going to be comparative. If I am first and I display that my bag fee is X dollars, the total is going to show the fare plus the bag fee. If my competitor has a bag fee but hasn’t filed that information, then their fare may seem cheaper even though in reality it’s not.??
So there’s a bit of concern about who goes first and being at a disadvantage, and I think that’s where government can play a role. If we all really do want to get to transparency for the consumer — having products available on a non-discriminatory basis across the market — then maybe it takes government to say, ‘Here’s a deadline. By this deadline everyone must begin filing’ [ancillary fees]. That way there is no disadvantage to one airline going to market sooner than another.??
* The Airline Tariff Publishing Company, ATPCO, or ATP, is a corporation that publishes the latest airfares for more than 500 airlines multiple times per day. Based at Washington Dulles International Airport, ATPCO is owned by a number of U.S. and international airlines.
