GBT’s Non-GDS Charge Makes Sense

Buyers have a new distribution dilemma.

American Express GBT is phasing in a $10 surcharge for handling airline tickets from carriers who don’t use common industry channels for sales and settlement. (More coverage here, here and here.)

Think of this as the opposite of the €16 surcharge that Lufthansa Group is applying to tickets purchased via the traditional GDS/TMC channel. One happens if you buy in the GDS, the other happens if your LCC airline doesn’t play there.

Both of these surcharges annoy buyers. “What – you’re going to charge me more based on where I buy a ticket, or who I buy it from – that’s outrageous!”

In fact, it makes perfect sense.  Lufthansa and GBT make the same point – their costs to

Two Steps Closer to a 2-Channel Future

Travel managers, you’re gonna need a two-channel booking strategy.  Maybe not this year, but fairly soon in the scheme of corporate travel time.

The second shoe dropped last week, when The Company Dime broke the news (paywall, worth it) about airlines making complex trips (roughly anything not a simple one-way or round-trip) more expensive  – sometimes moderately, sometimes drastically more expensive.

Reliable sources estimate these complex trips to be anywhere from 7% to 16% of a corporate account’s transactions, depending on your definition and travel patterns.  Call it 10%  – that’s a significant chunk of bookings that are now at risk of much higher prices.

The cost-avoiding solution is to book each individual destination within the itinerary as

Why Lufthansa Will Change Our Industry for the Better

Lufthansa Group announced a bold move to charge 16 euros for each ticket issued through a GDS.  Like any other unilateral cost increase,  it’s unwelcome. Travel managers are fuming; many of you seem really angry.

It reminds me of the withering challenges Continental took on back in the day when they forced corporate accounts to accept Prism’s contract monitoring as a condition for getting corporate discounts.

Today, contract monitoring is widely used because it benefits those buyers who meet their market share commitments.

So, deep breaths everyone.  Let’s consider the longer-term implications of Lufthansa’s unbundling the distribution value of the GDS channel.

First, this is another form of ancillary revenue for the airlines.  It just happens to be aimed at the travel manager, rather than the travelers.  Like travelers facing choices about fare families and other forms of bundled benefits, you travel managers have to decide if the GDS-bundled price is worth the value.

No doubt, there is real value in booking via the GDS/TMC channel.  Easy comparison shopping, immediate itinerary support from your TMC partner, and full data integration come right to mind.  The good news is that you still  have this well-oiled, high-value channel available to you.

Whether the GDS channel is worth 16 euros is your call. What used to be “free” is now out in the sunshine, where free markets can more easily decide its true value.  The debate needs to be about the price, and not Lufthansa’s right to charge it.

Now let’s imagine what may happen if other airlines adopt this same unbundling strategy, enough so that most travelers – leisure and business – have the same choice every time they want to buy a ticket on most any airline.

Will the leisure traveler place the same value on easy comparison shopping, TMC support, and data integration?  Of course not.  So all those leisure transactions will move to the lower cost, lower value channel of airline-direct booking, which is where most of them are anyway.

Guess what?  A big chunk of business travelers book just like leisure travelers.  They are price sensitive.  They book in advance.  They don’t change their travel plans.  And they don’t worry about needing a dedicated agent if something goes wrong.

Call these the commodity travelers of the business world.  They will naturally gravitate to the cheaper booking channel, removing a not-insignificant volume of transactions from the GDS engines.

All you travel managers in low-cost cultures will feel pressure to help them do this.  You’ll shift some of that pressure to the airlines, your TMC partners and other parties to bring you back the data you need from all those airline-direct bookings.

Those pipes will grow.  Maybe not great pipes, but good enough for the essential job of providing duty of care data and some purchase/policy information.  You’ll get by, and you’ll save some money by swimming in this cheaper distribution channel.

But with the GDSs losing notable volumes of their bread-and-butter transactions – the basic trips, no itinerary changes, no refunds or exchanges – their profit margins will take a hit.

The GDSs are left to handle the complex ticketing jobs on smaller volumes, and so will raise their fees to the airlines.  The airlines will respond by adjusting their GDS channel surcharge, until the market stabilizes in favor of the airlines.

Why will the airlines win?  Because GDSs set their prices to airlines in multi-year contracts, while the airlines can change their channel surcharge prices overnight.

But here’s the magic of free markets.  When all the airlines are charging GDS surcharges and reducing their distribution costs, they have to decide what to do with their new profits.

Well, we’re seeing this movie play out with traditional ancillary revenues.  Airlines are using those profits to fund new terminals, buy new planes, invest in the traveler experience…all good things for an industry criticized for treating passengers as an afterthought.

On an even more optimistic note, assume that the airline industry gets its fill of new terminals, new planes and happy travelers.  What then?  Will they be able to keep their fatter profit margins, or will the typical airline revenue management models takeover, and seek more volume by reducing fares?

I think that’s what will happen.  In the long run, these GDS surcharge revenues will get competed away in the form of lower airfares, until the airline profit margins are back to where they are now.

And don’t think this is all bad news for the GDSs.  This surcharge shock will give them every incentive to prove  – and improve – the value of their channel.  Look for significant upgrades in the way they commercialize their shopping assets, and  sell and service travel bookings. Amadeus’s new Exchange Relief product is a good example of this type of value-creating innovation.

On an even more optimistic note, what if this surcharge shock transformed the daisy chain of money being passed around this industry?  Wouldn’t it be great if everyone knew the costs of each step in the channel?  Even better, if they had choices about which steps to pay for?

Silver linings, folks…this will eventually be good for our industry.

GDS Surcharges: What’s A Fair Price?

Now that Lufthansa Group has announced its €16 surcharge for bookings made in the GDS channel, let’s tackle the fundamental issue it raises.

If the GDS channel offers a better value to corporate buyers, then what is  a fair price for using that channel?

Asked the other way, if booking directly on an airline’s website offers less value than the GDS channel, how much of a price incentive does the airline need to offer its customers?

Lufthansa has set that price at €16.  If the price were €1, the corporate travel industry would still be having a tizzy fit, but only on principle.  You couldn’t credibly claim that the benefits of booking in the GDS-TMC channel are not worth such a small amount.

Just to make this more debatable, assume that instead of setting a surcharge for bookings made in the GDS channel, an airline offered its corporate customers a €100 discount on all tickets booked directly via its website.

Of course the airline would see a huge take-up on that offer, because at that price, the disadvantages of the direct booking have been more than offset by the direct-channel incentive.

The point is that there must be a price at which the benefits of booking via the GDS channel matches the value received.

It is unfair to both the GDSs and the airlines to pretend otherwise.

So why shouldn’t an airline set a price and see what happens?  How else will the market really know what the true value is?

More coverage on this issue here, here, here and here.

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Lufthansa Accelerates Managed Travel 2.0

Lufthansa Group announced it will charge 16 Euros for each booking made in the GDS channel.

This is a seismic event for the corporate travel industry for these reasons:

• Channel steering becomes a differentiator for legacy carriers
• GDS/TMC  and GDS/airline economics will need re-shaping
• TMC/Corporate deals and service levels will need re-engineering
• The value proposition for TMCs gets murkier while their need for adding non-booking value becomes crucial
• Closing the data loop for corporate direct bookings becomes imperative

My best guess about the steady-state result?  Managed Travel 2.0 will be widely enabled, if not adopted.  (Kindly recall that MT 2.0 is not the same as Open Booking.  The former closes the data loop between supplier-direct bookings and the corporate buyer; the latter does not – that’s called unmanaged travel.)

But much depends over the next few years on

De-Commoditizing Airlines – A Long Road Ahead

Last week in Beijing I made the case for de-commoditizing the airlines.  Even though it was a friendly audience at the CASMA Fall Global Conference, there was some sharp discussion during Q&A.  Fair enough, as I skewered American’s handling of its Direct Connect value prop to the business travel community.  Here are the key points:

Does Distribution Really Matter? Can it Differentiate Airline Products?

Absolutely.  Think about how the endpoint of the distribution chain looks today.  You still see flight times, carrier logos and prices.  Pretty commodity-like stuff, that.  From green screen GDS terminals to mobile booking displays,  all you see is a long list of racked-and-stacked flight options.

It’s the equivalent of shopping in the paper towel aisle at WalMart. Price dominates.

Enter Curation, Visualization and Personalization

Direct Connect By Google – Oh Yes

It’s a simple formula. Google Flight Search + Airlines’ Hunger for Direct Connect = Trouble for GDSs.

You may think Google Flight Search is just another meta search tool.  I think it is a major step in a campaign to build direct connections between airlines and travelers. Google Flight Search is GDS Bypass personified.

Google sees the GDSs as fortresses, producing hundreds of millions of captive airline searches beyond the reach of any search engine. Searches that need to be freed. Searches that should have the right to be completed directly with the supplier. Searches that in their basic form can be served up quite nicely with Google Flight Search.

But the campaign is far from over.  Airline products are

An Open Approach to Travel Distribution?

Travel managers, watch this 2-minute video about the benefits of open API systems, and then ask yourself how it could – should – be applied to the travel industry:

To me, this video makes the point beautifully that open systems create unlimited opportunities. Closed systems, bounded by definition, can and do create value – but which type do you really want to bet on?

Let’s consider the case of direct connections (DC). As I told an audience last week, American Airlines has done an incredibly crappy job

TIILTS: Socially Aware Reservations

There’s got to be a way to cut through all the clutter when it comes to travel-related offers.  One solution may be to create socially aware offers tied to what’s known about the traveler.

Start with  a booked (or just planned) date and destination.  Combine that with the traveler’s socially-accessible profile. Assume the traveler selects a persona or trip type, such as “Business + client entertainment”, or “Family vacation”, “Romantic getaway”.   Presume the traveler has tied some preferences to each persona.

Together, these elements form the Social Reservation.  Put that in the cloud, and let suppliers have a look!

No doubt, given the ever-improving analytics of travel marketers, we’d see more on-target offers presented. Think Groupon and Google Offers brought to your social reservation’s doorstep.

Since the reservation is now social,

Four Barriers to Travel Innovation

I recently claimed in this webinar that the travel industry’s innovative golden years were in the 1990s, and that our industry hasn’t seen much innovation (with a capital I) since.

Why the lack of innovation, you ask?  I listed three factors, and am adding a fourth here.

Barrier 1: The legacy “Rows and columns” GDS mentality. The GDSs are arguably the most influential – and constraining –  link in the travel value chain. Their products and attitudes about travel technology have driven much, maybe most, of the way suppliers, TMCs and many corporate buyers think about the travel technology landscape, for better or worse.