Freebird hired as senior vice president of sales Mike Daly, a corporate travel veteran who left Deem after 13 years. Three-year-old, Cambridge, Mass.-based Freebird offers flight disruption protection through travel management companies. When flights are disrupted, Freebird looks for better ways to get customers to their destinations and pays for new tickets from revenues derived from…
Deem is working on mobile messaging to remind travelers to book hotels and ground transportation if they didn’t do so when making an airline reservation. The company plans to make it available through Apple iOS and Google Android messaging applications starting in the fourth quarter. Deem will expand the service in 2019 to cover flight…
Delta Air Lines expects to start piloting its new application programming interfaces with distribution intermediaries by the end of the year. While those APIs will be available to other aggregators, the focus is on global distribution systems. “For the Delta distribution strategy, which may differ from others, we view GDSs as consumers of the overwhelming…
When will NDC really start to make a difference at corporate travel points of sale? Maybe next year. That’s when Amadeus expects to start testing its New Distribution Capability solution with corporate agencies, and when Travelport expects to provide agencies complete content aggregation in a single workflow. A first step for Travelport, planned for this…
When Lufthansa Group in mid-2015 informed the market of a new distribution strategy, one stated objective was to lower associated costs. The company expects to prove wrong the skeptics and start achieving that by the end of 2018. Lufthansa’s financial reporting does not offer enough detail to completely validate progress, but there are indicators of…
According to published reports in Europe, Lufthansa Group on April 5 began discounting by 20 euros some short-haul economy-class roundtrip fares when booked through direct or NDC-enabled channels. This is on top of the 16 euro surcharge Lufthansa, Austrian and Swiss currently apply on bookings through global distribution systems, effectively more than doubling the disadvantage…
The news that an activist investor took a stake in Travelport to push a possible sale of the company has analysts, consultants and industry leaders speculating about the possibilities. Could the GDS be broken up and sold to its two Western rivals? What about keeping it whole and selling to China-based TravelSky? Is there a…
End of content
End of content
