5/11/2010 1:56 AM

So you want to sell travel!

So You Want to Sell Travel?

You have a successful business, a strong client base, and would like to add travel to your offering directly to your customers, not just internal employees. If your business is in no way related to the industry what do you do?

Here are the major topics to start with.

Travel Agency - To Be or Not To Be, To Pretend To Be, or To Be More. You might not think you need to become an full-fledged agency to sell travel however it is much more difficult than you might think especially when it comes to selling air travel. Here are some important questions to ask yourself that help determine if you should:

• Become a Tradiditional Agency
• Use a Host Agency
• Align with a Consortia
• Fake It - Join an OTA

4/22/2010 2:56 AM

Price Vs Destination

It seems to be an endless debate but how important is price over destination when it comes to aifare? Or destination over price rather? Would you sell airfare at no profit for the sake of providing your customers more destination options? Would this generate more sales for non-Air segment types? Food for thought!

4/1/2010 2:50 PM

Great article on Travel Mole about current airfare prices

"For many US cities, the price to fly is dropping. On paper, at least, but are they really?

One example: round-trip fares out of Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport fell 15 percent from 2000 to last year, and more than 30 percent between 2008 and 2009.

The problem: any money saved on airfare has been gobbled up by escalating fees that airlines are now charging for items that were once free as they've tried to cope with the travel slowdown, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

In the first three quarters of 2009, Northwest Airlines took in nearly $206 million in baggage fees. Delta charged passengers $350 million, more than double from the year before. For all airlines, passengers shelled out nearly $2 billion for baggage and $1.8 billion to change tickets.

With many heading out for spring break this week or looking at summer travel plans, experts predict airfares will start to inch back up, partly because of pent-up demand. But fees will continue.

"The fare that you see may be lower than it was two or three years ago. But the actual amount of money that you're going to pay is higher and sometimes considerably higher, especially if you're traveling with your family," said consumer travel expert Chris Elliott.

With the fees here to stay, he said the next issue is disclosure. "Can an airline or online travel agency still quote a low 'base' fare minus taxes and mandatory charges, duping passengers into making a purchasing decision -- or should it disclose all of your costs upfront?" he asked.

Nationally, airfares are dropping, down nine percent since 2000 and 14 percent between the third quarters of 2008 and 2009, the most recent time frame available.

Capacity cuts -- which have airlines flying smaller and fewer planes on certain routes -- were supposed to bring prices up. But business travel blogger Joe Brancatelli said the lack of demand is keeping prices down.

"The only thing that drives fares up is whether people want to buy [tickets]. It doesn't matter whether you have one seat of 100 seats," he said, referring to the airlines' cuts.

But all in all, he said, many people chose not to fly because of "hideous security rules, uncomfortable airline flights, nasty airline policies. So suddenly that driving trip to Montana is looking pretty good."

Elliott agreed, saying it's the consumer who sets fares. "For the last two years, we've just said: ‘We chose not to fly.’"

Minneapolis travel expert Terry Trippler said one reason fares have dropped is that travelers are switching -- and staying -- with the low-cost carriers. "A lot of business travelers are saying we're not going to take that $1,200 fare," he said."

3/30/2010 1:45 AM

GDS Hotel Content

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when using GDS's to sell hotel inventory is content. Unfortunately the GDS's have a warped pass through procedure where all the content is actually just forwarded by the hotels data entry folks into the GDS which in turn gets spat out to the front end UI of countless booking engines. Issues such as bad grammar, unpunctuated text and illegal characters are common occurances across the majority of hotels in the GDS's.

The task at hand is to make GDS data presentable to your end consumer. How is this achieved easily when all data elements are free text with no particular structure? How are you parse a telephone number when it can come in many unpredictable formats? Are we simply forced to guess the number for formats one can adopt or is there a better way to handle content? For years the GDS's have been proclaiming that they are working on strategies to correct the problem.

Currently there are companies offering superior hotel content. Such companies claim to have content for all hotels in the main GDS systems, and guarantee accuracy. Indeed there are companies that will charge $4.00 per hotel for content, but does this serve the masses?

3/10/2010 4:21 PM

Globalization of travel systems

Many OTA's in the North American market have closed the door on themselves when it comes to servicing the world. When you visit a European OTA brand like Opodo.com you see a splash screen with language options. Why is it that this is seen so infrequently with North American based brands?

Possible reasons why OTA's do not service other markets and provide content in different languages :

• Their technology does not support multiple languages, cultures and currencies.
• It may be unfeasible to support an after sales operation with no multi-lingual staff.
• The risk of fraud when opening your doors to the world is too high.
• Currency conversion.
• High merchant fees for international payments.