Travelport to Charge for Spikes in Passive Segments

Travelport is setting ground rules to make sure that airlines that connect directly with travel sellers don’t get a free ride in its GDS.

Effective Nov. 1, Travelport will charge agencies a $3.75 GDS processing fee for PNRs that include passive air segments above a defined agency baseline.

Bookings made via a supplier direct connect or supplier website and stored in a Travelport system are common examples of air passive segments that, when above the baseline,  will be subject to the GDS processing fee.

Baseline formula
To determine the baseline, Travelport will use data from July 1, 2010, through June 30, 2011. It will divide the number of the subscriber’s total passive PNRs by the number of its total PNRs to obtain its passive PNR percentage.

Travelport will increase each subscriber’s passive PNR percentage by 5%. The resulting figure will become the subscriber’s baseline of chargeable passive PNRs in any given calendar month.

Preventing ‘abuse’
With American Airlines touting its Direct Connect technology and other carriers, notably Delta and US Airways, also exploring direct connections, the company is seeking to prevent “abuse of the Travelport system,” it said.

“Travelport facilitates agency integration by allowing passive segment use. This is a value-add service where Travelport systems are used for activity that the company is not being paid for.”

Saw it coming?
In a recent ASTA Legal Symposium, travel lawyer Mark Pestronk suggested that GDS vendors could impose new fees if agencies want direct-connect booking information transferred into the GDS as a passive segment and fed into the back-office system.

Travelport is the first GDS company to impose such a fee.