DISTRIBUTION / TRAVEL MANAGERS
The evolution of travel distribution is manifesting in ways that aren’t all music to travel managers’ ears, writes Betty Low . With additional reporting from Michael Baker and Elizabeth West AT THE COALFACE
W hen Ben Park, senior director procurement and travel at Parexel, was asked what his biggest challenge right now was, he didn’t miss a beat. “It’s very simple: travellers going on dot com pages of airline and rail companies and comparing the products and prices they see publicly with what’s on the corporate booking channels,” he explains. This neatly summarises one of today’s big challenges for travel managers. The days of GDSs’ having full content may have been consigned to history but the demand for it remains. Pascal Jungfer, managing director of Arkea Consulting, reiterates the travel manager refrain: “It’s content, content, content”. The rules of the game have changed. As a travel manager in financial services pointed out during the research for this piece, “Previously, comparing the content on managed channels with that on direct channels was not like for like. That is no longer the case. Fares online are cheaper and it is like for like.” “What is not changing,” says Jungfer, “is the race between content generation and the desire to organise the multifaceted and changing aspects within a marketplace. What is changing with NDC and deregulation and new entrants is the organisation and creation. It shows the value chain is constantly moving, which is a good thing. For example, travel management companies have to find ways to integrate content. It’s why they’re proposing their own hotel platform – clients can’t function with hotels only in GDS.”
Jungfer’s comments are a reminder of the everlasting push-pull of “new content and new ways to distribute it”. He continues: “There’s always a generation of new content because of deregulation or new players or smarter marketing and packaging – NDC, for example.” Creativity and change may be positive in a macro sense but that does not mean there are not challenges for individual players – especially travel managers. Content may be their perennial desire, but its distribution became disrupted when it ceased being delivered through a single source (see p26-29). When low-cost carriers, with their direct-to-market principles, started to become used by business travellers in managed programmes, they were a minor irritant which was solved by a hybrid presence on the GDS. When NDC and its XML methodology came along (see p30-33), the minor irritant of non-GDS content became a major headache. The suppliers’ distributors – travel management companies and aggregators alike – are well aware that they are on a journey to accommodate more and more non-GDS content (see p40-42) into channels that work for travel managers. Bookings made either through the TMC or an online booking tool depend on technology developed by and for GDS content. NDC content is made available through aggregators. It includes extra products and services that corporates want but whether it is actually available depends on whether it can be accommodated by the TMC and booking tool.
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businesstravelnewseurope.com | SPRING 2023
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