New York – Spotnana officials have been calling it the AWS of travel, but the reference only gets you so far outside tech and investment circles. Concepts like open stack and microservices help a little. In corporate travel, though, people want to know whether you are attempting to be a GDS, an OBT, a TMC…
Air Canada 18 years ago debuted fare families, a response to low-cost competition that set off a revolution in airline pricing. The company’s decision shortly thereafter to make some fares exclusive to its direct channels augured similar moves more than a decade later by big carriers in Europe and elsewhere. Is Montréal changing the game…
Ryanair has withheld services from corporate travelers who used third-party aggregation systems such as Travelfusion to book tickets, according to sources. These passengers found themselves entangled by Ryanair’s long-running fight against “screen scrapers,” online services that scan airline websites for fares and inventory that they or partners can resell. Handling bookings coming in via Travelfusion…
A startup that checks some of the buzzy boxes is looking to create a business travel marketplace without much of the traditional distribution infrastructure. TravelBloc will target the unmanaged and small and medium-sized business segments. It plans to enlist travel management companies for support and use a global distribution system, but direct connections to airlines…
Amtrak turns 50 years old on May 1. Unless it patches up a relationship with content aggregator Travelfusion, it will be celebrating without connections to various corporate travel points of sale. According to Travelfusion CEO Moshe Rafiah, the rail operator a few months ago informed his company that it wanted to end its agreement to…
With reaction, assessment and recovery on their minds, corporate travel professionals understandably did not focus closely on airline distribution developments this year. Inasmuch as they did, for some, it was a question of how the relevant systems could help the response to the pandemic — or not. There’s some debate about how soon the usually…
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…
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