Airline Travel Sites
Carrier Travel locationsNow, some airline companies are reconsidering this scheme by showing the availabilities and tariffs of competing airline companies alongside their own. Icelandair has started to display a sample of other airline flight types in its results in seperate reviews. Ideally, by showing how competitively they offer, airline companies can convince more customers to buy immediately.
Thus, for example, a customer purchasing on Icelandair for a round voyage between London and New York City could see, in addition to the airline's own flight, fares and detail for similar flight types of three competing airline companies. Results from competing providers are for viewing only. You cannot be booked via the mark. com site, in part because airline companies are not licenced as agent and have no business arrangements to resell trips to other airline companies that are not codeshare affiliates.
Airline experimentation was presented on Thursday at a client meeting in Houston for PROS (Pricing and Revenue Optimization Solutions), a listed cluster solution provider. Travelaer, a start-up travel technologies firm located in Sophia Antipolis, France, presented the prototype at the show. Journeyaer sell reserve motors to airline companies.
However, it has developed a special offer known as Right Fly, which allows carriers with popular bookers to include a simple route compare in their results. Although not a games changer, debugging is remarkable because it indicates that there is a process of merging between e-commerce sites, meta-vendors, and travel agents on-line.
"We have seen the boundaries between searching and retailing become blurred as old landscaped gardens and open, cross-brand experience make way for open markets - even where you wouldn't have expected it," said Richard Harris, co-founder and CEO of Intent Media, a travel site information sciences group. One of the reasons why the test is remarkable is that it is a case of an airline taking a page out of the hotels' book.
More and more hoteliers have been offering similar "mini-meta search" utilities on their brand sites to allow customers to view tariffs elsewhere. Carriers are running behind to increase the number of converting or consumer switching from their brand sites to ticketing. By 2017, 70 million installment payments were carried out with the utility "Price Check" on various hotel sites, the firm said.
Airline companies also try to attract travellers when their on-line behaviour indicates that they are about to access a brand-name website. The Travelaer solution includes a feature that will appear when a client is about to depart, displaying the airline's best fares and an optional comparison with a sample of competitors.
The US hospitality sector has been trying a similar move for five years through Room Key, a provider of hospitality searching engines established by Choice, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), Marriott and Wyndham. Every time a customer visits one of the hotel's brand sites, a pop-up screen will appear, showing prices for similar items from other labels.
With other words, several hoteliers have ruled that it is better to resell each other's homes than for providers to do more overall shopping with travel agents on-line - given the higher brokerages commission. If so, will the airline carry out the same calculations? It also tests with the airline company that replaces the windows that say that "your results are temporary" if a user has remained on a page for too long, with a new windows that encourages the airline company's best airline for booking, holding, or tracking - optional in addition to fare for similar tickets available on other airline company's.
Tariffs are not available, as competing airlines' datafeeds are usually still not mature, as they do not yet provide all the technology necessary for smooth payments andandling. Regulating the aviation sector could avoid a cooperation agreement similar to the one that Room Key hotel operators have entered into.
It is not obvious that all carriers will be satisfied that their airline information is being used by competing carriers to rob their businesses. Historically, American, Delta, Ryanair, Southwest, and United have had disputes over the use of their information by on-line travel agencies such as eDreams and Momondo and third parties such as Points.com, the supplier of loyal technologies.
Airline companies have often successfully reasoned that they are effective advertisers who own their own contents. The traveler doesn't have to worry. Mike Sloan, chief executive officer, said that his business would comply with any requests to delete airline contents, but he does not anticipate the problem to occur. How does Travelaer obtain the information it uses? Travelaer retrieves information from the airline's customer services system, such as the Altéa system of the travel agency Amadeus, for the airline's own distribution.
It obtains seating information and fares for similar competing airline services through PROS, which in turn uses the technologies it purchased last year when it purchased Vayant Travel Technologies, a provider of air traffic control equipment, for $35 million. Each airline has price information at the Airline Tariff Publishing or ATPCO, a fares accounting office frequently used by meta-search engine and on-line travel agents.
We also receive information from Travelport, a travel technologies supplier for travel agents and airline companies. Evaluations and flight description of an airline and its competitors are carried out by Routehappy, a flight contents supplier recently taken over by ATPCO. Others will probably try to provide similar Travelaer related service if the service turns out to be attractive.
Such a supplier is already the UK Air Black Box, which has recently introduced to the market a technological system claiming to be able to interconnect each airline with another airline for different kinds of cross-selling, although it also provides stand-alone service. For years, Asian Pacific carriers and airfields have been using the system in multi-carrier modes.
A number of carriers, such as Ryanair, have developed much of their own technologies and may decide to establish cross-selling interconnectivity themselves. Travelaer's products show that airline companies have started to make their information more creatively available for use by third people. You could think that Airbnb, the rented accommodation platform, would tiptoe to a wider travel operator using a similar utility to the one described here.
Airbnb, for example, could include a wide spread on each page of object descriptions showing some flight connections to the next main hub from the user's home town. Using this drop-down list of flight options could help a traveller determine the full costs of a journey and more likely make an accommodation reservation.
By becoming a licenced travel agency, the site could receive live airline feedback and make these linkable. When Airbnb decided to offer for sale directly from airline companies, it was able to select from a small number of suppliers to provide this small feature in addition to those listed here.
Flyiin, for example, is working on supporting the meta finder, which eliminates third-party providers such as on-line travel agents and only displays directly chargeable rates for the Qixxit travel engine. Briefly, there are indications that airline sales will become more imaginative and interesting over the next five years.