THE COST OF CONTENT Charges for non-GDS content are not new, but they are a recent addition for one corporate BTN Europe spoke with who now pays a ‘high-cost’ booking fee “on any booking that doesn’t exist in the GDS – so any component that requires an agent to make a reservation in a third party tool or via a non-GDS API.” They say the same flat fee is applied on both offline and online bookings and is on top of the company’s regular booking fee. “We’re over a barrel,” they say. “We don’t want to promote people going out of the programme [to avoid the cost] because we want to maintain visibility of the booking. At the same time, we also appreciate there are increasing costs and decreasing revenues for TMCs.” The travel manager, who did not want to be named, continues: “What really gets me is that this is being charged on online transactions for something like an easyJet flight which is entirely self-service and yet they [the TMC] have been providing that content without additional fees for years. It’s more understandable in the case of NDC content.” FCM, Amex GBT and CWT all apply surcharges for the booking of non-GDS content, with the latter saying it is “constantly being reassessed given the dynamic market conditions related to NDC”. Amex GBT says it introduced its high- cost booking fee several years ago in order to make the costs of inefficient distribution as transparent as possible. “To manage high-cost bookings, we incur aggregator fees that don’t exist in a more efficient channel, as well as increased servicing time for our agents,” it told BTN Europe. While some TMCs levy a surcharge for the booking of non-GDS content, Geert de Boo, vice president global business travel at JTB Business Travel, says his company is in “wait and see mode” regarding the
introduction of ‘high-cost booking’ fees. He does however acknowledge that develop- ments in the NDC arena this year, together with shrinking supplier revenues, are shaking up TMC commercials. “We try and avoid differentiating where content comes from because business travellers have no idea if it comes from the GDS, an NDC pipe or an aggregator. It doesn’t matter to them. Content is content. But it’s an example of more friction and complexities,” says de Boo. He continues: “Content distribution is increasingly fragmented. The cost model is really changing from being incentivised to distribute content to having to pay for it. The commercials of the distribution model are going to change and we can see it turning upside down. That has an impact on how we distribute cost to our client.” One travel manager who BTN Europe spoke with believes there is plenty of good technology available to help TMCs integrate non-GDS content. “If a TMC is charging for something where they are lacking, then maybe they haven’t been doing things right in their technology road map for years,” says Ben Park, senior director procurement and travel, Parexel. An independent consultant who wishes to remain anonymous agrees: “The whole GDS, non-GDS content thing… buyers don’t like that. I should be able to get whatever content I need and whatever agreements TMCs have in place in the background, that’s their problem.” Martin Warner inevitably highlights American Airlines’ plans to remove some 40 per cent of its fares from traditional EDIFACT-based distribution channels in April and push the industry down NDC paths instead. “TMC have got these difficult-to-access bookings and they’re having to use additional technologies, but are they not going to rework their business process flow?” he asks.
The cost model is changing from being incentivised to distribute content to having to pay for it
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SPRING 2023 | businesstravelnewseurope.com
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