EasyJet's newly reduced fee for bookings through Amadeus and Galileo is enticing Concur to book the British carrier through the global distribution systems. Concur executive vice president Tom DePasquale, who in March said Concur rejected the previously higher price, on Tuesday asked his development team to link Concur's Cliqbook to those GDSs for easyJet bookings after easyJet on Monday announced a cut in its point-of-sale fee to £3.30 (€4) per segment from "up to £5 (€7.50)" per segment.
"When easyJet first announced it, the economics made no sense to me and I was fairly outspoken about that," said DePasquale. "I think this is a more positive and constructive step than we're seeing out of
Ryanair's hard stance. We should reward such constructive steps."
Such a GDS connection would typically take less than 90 days to enable, DePasquale said, but he didn't want to make an estimate in this case since the request was just made. Concur still has no plans to use easyJet's application programming interface, which requires fees that DePasquale said still do not "fit our economic goals."
The latest
Ryanair debacle where they are trying to ban the booking of their flights through travel management companies and screen scrapers set me to wonder again about their CEO Michael O'Leary.
It raised the same haunting question which I have considered with every one of his past rabid outbursts, which is: is he brilliant or is he bonkers?
EasyJet's decision to charge as much as €7.50 per sector for bookings made through global distribution systems has not been a popular one. While the carrier said surcharging was a pre-condition of its GDS participation, distribution development manager Jerry Dunn speaking last week during a
TTG Business webinar said the size of the surcharge could be re-examined if demand slackens.
