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Posted Feb 20, 2010
Posted Feb 20, 2010
Posted Feb 19, 2010
Orbitz has launched a new platform for traditional travel agents which enables them to book stand-alone hotel rooms as well as vacation packages. This matches (for hotel only anyway) agentaccess, a program which hotels.com has offered to the agency community for some time.
Posted Jan 21, 2010
I have been doing a straw poll among some of our clients and friends to see what their segment incentive fees are from the GDSs. A disclaimer here is that this is from a non-representative sample of agencies. However, I don't think they are atypical. The sample size was from a mixture of major and non-major travel markets worldwide. The reason for doing the poll was because an associate quoted a number of one of his clients to me that I thought was somewhat high. Boy was I wrong.
Posted Jan 13, 2010
The Interactive Travel Services Association commissioned PhoCusWright to produce a paper outlining the "role and influence" of the global distribution systems. You can get it here. For most industry participants, the paper will contain little new information. It looks more like a primer that GDS companies reportedly planning to go public can hand out to potential investors and analysts. If I can be permitted to stereotype, the GDS role is as familiar to such folks as is the dark side of the moon (not the album). ITSA executive director Art Sackler declined to answer my question on whether the paper's timing is related to IPOs, but nevertheless, I have to agree with him that such a paper "was long past due."
Posted Dec 16, 2009
Against a lot of odds, Travelport retained Flight Centre Limited in Australia. Or at least part of the business. The odds were definitely against Travelport. Amadeus had mounted a very strong campaign as had Sabre. Heavyweights went a courting in Brisbane. In the end, it probably came down to the cost of transition rather than anything else. I suspect that the canny people at FCL knew that there were certain concessions that they wanted from Travelport to stay on Galileo.
Posted Dec 4, 2009
Posted Dec 3, 2009
Limited access to fares and inventory from Brazilian airlines Gol and Tam has frustrated corporate travel agencies and buyers for years. Gol last week announced expanded participation with the global distribution system providers, but a Gol representative nevertheless indicated that "there is no GDS provider with Gol's full content."
Posted Nov 29, 2009
Orange smiles all round it would seem. Easyjet has been making some headway in the fight on driving yield on their flights. The average flight is yielding more and the orange crew seem to be beating the blue/yellow crew in this respect.
From the conference call 10 days ago, easyJet was able to report the following:
Posted Nov 13, 2009
Reprinted with kind permission of The Beat ~ a travel business newsletter New York City 11/9/09 2:32 PM
For many of us who have been involved in travel distribution, it has been an open secret that the global distribution system technology at the core of distribution was if not obsolete at the very least obsolescent--a case that has existed from at least the 1990s and, in my opinion, from before then. This was driven both by the business model of the legacy GDS as well as the strictures of the GDS core software based on IBM's venerable TPF [Transaction Processing Facility] operating system.
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