During his 41-year career in travel, Partnership Travel Consulting’s Tom Kallas held senior roles at corporate travel agencies including BCD Travel, IVI, Travelocity Business and World Travel Inc. Here he argues that TMC pricing is “not simply repeal and replace.” The recent article regarding the American Express Global Business Travel strategy to charge a fee…
Southwest Airlines expects next quarter to add virtually all its fares and inventory to Travelport’s Apollo and Worldspan global distribution systems, in accordance with its August announcement about expanded GDS participation. Amadeus and Travelport’s Galileo will get equivalent feeds later this year. Sabre is TBD. “We are no longer having conversations regarding full participation within…
After Travelport declined to comment for a Jan. 22 article about rationalizing its core systems, the company’s board approved funding for that purpose. Travelport then made its CEO available to industry media. Asked last week what he meant by some comments in the published interviews, Greg Webb threw his predecessors under the bus. According to…
Wilmington, Del. — Global distribution systems dominate indirect air travel distribution because travel agencies don’t want it another way. So it’s not unexpected to find that a new initiative like moving to XML-based connectivity under NDC takes a long time. So says an award-winning economist who has studied the travel distribution market for about a…
Trial testimony by CWT president and CEO Kurt Ekert proved instructive for anyone looking to understand travel management company dependence on global distribution systems. There was no elephant in the courtroom on the payments GDS firms make to TMCs. Ekert acknowledged that in 2018, GDS companies paid CWT incentives totaling roughly $155 million, about 10…
BCD Travel is paying Microsoft about $20 million for a multi-GDS search and booking desktop system that also could help agents manage bookings made outside the global distribution systems. The travel management company a decade ago retired a similar initiative after airlines patched up their differences with GDS providers. The ultimate cost of the project…
Wilmington, Del. — Sabre has entertained the idea of charging airlines lower prices for bookings made through NDC-compliant connections than it does for those made traditionally. The information emerged here Thursday during testimony at the United States of America v. Sabre trial. According to evidence presented in the trial, American, Delta and United as of…
End of content
End of content
