BTN EUROPE’S DISTRIBUTION ISSUE
THE ROLE OF AGGREGATORS GDS New Entrants emerged as low-cost carriers splintered from traditional distribution pathways, preferring direct website bookings to paying global distribution fees. But LCCs still wanted to participate in corporate agency and online travel agency marketplaces, and travellers wanted that content. Aggregators answered the demand by providing direct connect technologies into their third-party systems and pumping that content into the agencies. As airline merchandisng heated up, aggregators expanded their capabilities to get fare families and ancillary content into their pipes. New Distribution Capability (NDC) has put a finer point on their connectivity skills, as players such as Travelfusion are highly engaged in the transformation. However, NDC creates a new dynamic between traditional GDSs and newer aggregators, as some GDSs now refer to themselves as the original aggregators. Where the industry may see the technology race heating up is in transformational technology that is able to get content that’s not in the traditional passenger name record (PNR) reformatted and serviceable in a TMC environment. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This distribution report (pages 26-50) would not have been possible without the assistance, insight and commentary of a host of industry experts from across the spectrum: buyers, consultants, TMCs, travel tech providers and more. Special thanks for going beyond the call of duty go to: Ann Cederhall , vice president, travel technology specialist, LeapShift; Ian Luck , head of airline distribution, T2RL; and Paul Tilstone , managing partner, Festive Road. In addition, we also extend our thanks to the following people who shared their views and insight during the research and writing of this report: Sam Abdou , executive vice president, air, rail & global online, Amadeus; Rajiv Ahluwalia , executive vice president, American Express Global Business Travel; David Bishop , chief operating officer, Gray Dawes Group; April Bridgeman , senior vice president, BCD Travel; Jason Clarke , chief commercial officer, Travelport; Lukasz Dabrowski , senior vice president global supplier relations, HRS Group; Mihai Dinu , global travel manager, UiPath; Angel Gallego , executive vice president travel distribution, Amadeus; Yanik Hoyles , director distribution, International Air Transport Association (IATA); Pascal Jungfer , CEO, Areka Consulting; Jean-Michel Kadaner , Areka Consulting; James Marchant , head of business development, easyJet; Ben Park , senior director procurement & travel, Parexel; Raj Sachdave , managing partner, Black Box Partnerships; Johannes Walter , head of channel partners, Lufthansa Group; Stefan Cars , chief executive & founder, Snowfall; and to the travel managers who shared their views but preferred not to be named within the report.
efforts, but the persistence of legacy technology and green screen interfaces and the lack of rich visual content and options to recombine ticket attributes has challenged the channel and the agents who access it. Airline websites, on the other hand, have transformed the consumer shopping and booking experience. Some carriers have turned to aggregators as a viable way to bypass the GDS and incorporate richer, more flexible content with systems based on extensive markup language, or XML. The industry has recently coalesced around XML technology standards of IATA’s New Distribution Capability, but GDS providers offered considerable opposition to those who sought other pipes for transmitting content between airlines and travel programmes. That all changed when Lufthansa Group broke away from GDS content parity agreements and pursued a direct distribution strategy that imposed a €16 booking fee on tickets purchased through GDSs. Will the GDSs survive? To answer that, look behind the curtain at Lufthansa Group’s technology partner. There you’ll find Amadeus IT Group, the IT solutions sibling of the Amadeus GDS.
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SPRING 2023 | businesstravelnewseurope.com
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