Travelport Ends Air Malta Agreement

In a galaxy far far away....

In a former life - I worked for Worldspan. In that job - one of the things we did was to break conventional models for airlines and distribution.

My team built a solution which let an airline have the benefit of a GDS connection in their market without having an onerous GDS contracting scheme to go with it. This solution was delivered outside of all conventional wisdom at effectively zero cost to the airline and no incremental cost to the agency community. Over the years it returned a nice revenue to Worldspan and then Travelport after it.

While this was not the first time that a dual mode terminal had been delivered in a market - it was the first time and as far as I can tell the only version that enabled a cut over of seamless nature in a market at really no cost.

Today's market costs by the GDSs are very different from the agreement that lasted more than 18 years in Malta. Travelport and Air Malta have announced the end of the agreement.

So hats off to all the team who worked on this project, to the airline's management who understood the value and to an era that has long gone replaced by a higher cost structure that ultimately adds cost to the passenger's ticket.

Cheers