BTC and ASTA Fire Salvo at IATA

Probably not the wisest move on their part but ASTA and BTC have fired a broadside against IATA's NDC "New Distribution Capability".

For your edification I reprint here their entire statement, feel free to comment:

ASTA AND BTC CHALLENGE IATA CLAIM OF TRANSPARENCY REGARDING NEW DISTRIBUTION CAPABILITY
Alexandria, Va., October 17, 2012— The American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) and Business Travel Coalition (BTC) today sharply disputed claims by Tony Tyler, CEO of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) that the development of the “New Distribution Capability” (NDC) was being conducted in open and transparent collaboration with all segments of the travel industry that would be affected by it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“ASTA sees nothing in the IATA process to create NDC that resembles full and open transparent collaboration with the travel agency community,” said Nina Meyer, CEO of ASTA.  “ASTA had asked to participate as an observer, with the possibility of posing questions, to the IATA Working Group on NDC in Montreal in late November.  IATA’s response was initially positive, citing a desire to collaborate. ASTA then invited IATA to come to its TRADESHOW in Los Angeles in September to meet with travel agencies and the Business Travel Coalition and respond to questions.  When ASTA later asked for details of its Montreal participation, it was told that neither it nor any other agency associations would have access to the development process for NDC. IATA did express a willingness to meet separate with ASTA, but that is far from the full collaboration and openness that IATA is trumpeting,” Meyer added.
BTC Chairman Kevin Mitchell said, “While we are still conducting due diligence with regard to understanding all the facts and implications flowing from IATA's new distribution initiative, it's reasonable to preliminarily conclude from discussions with and presentations from IATA that there is reason for significant concern over negative impacts to consumers, competition and costs. A disturbing warning sign - that all is not right - is that IATA pointedly talks about an open and collaborative industry process, yet refuses to let organizations that represent travel agents and corporate travel departments have a seat at the table. IATA only welcomes individual travel agents or travel managers who are largely prevented from speaking up for fear of retaliation on their businesses or airline contracts. BTC is among several industry organizations in the U.S. and abroad that requested to be part of the process only to be told no by IATA.”
Nina Meyer added, “The need for complete transparency regarding NDC is illustrated by some of the false premises for NDC that Mr. Tyler stated in his speech before the IATA World Passenger Symposium being held in Abu Dhabi this week.  Mr. Tyler stated that because the majority of air travel is sold by travel agencies relying on Global Distribution System (GDS) technology, “the travel offer is put together outside the airline by third parties… it is impossible for the airline to tailor its offer to the customer via the indirect channel…. this model is focused only on finding the lowest ticket price. This has resulted in the commoditization of air travel…. the travel agent only sees codes – F, J, Y…. There is no way to tell if your “J” product is a flat bed or an economy class seat with an empty seat beside it.”
These remarks essentially blame travel agents for airlines’ commoditization of their product. But it is airlines that have set prices since deregulation and entered into commoditized code share agreements, not travel agents. Agents sell what the airlines offer.  And ASTA rejects categorically the notion that travel agents do not understand what they are selling and are unable to communicate product characteristics to their clients.  If that were true, agents would have disappeared long ago, but instead in the United States alone they sold $68 billion in air transportation in 2011.
Moreover, Mr. Tyler’s remarks cite as current airline innovations such items as “special meals, expedited boarding, roomier seats and access to airport lounges.”  Most of these “innovations” have been around for years. If these products are made available to agents in a transparent and transactable manner, which is entirely possible through GDS technology and the ATPCO OC process, travel agents will sell more of them to consumers to the benefit of consumers and airlines alike. ASTA has seen demonstrations of GDS technology that has these capabilities and more.  Rote repetition of the claim that the GDSs can’t do this does not make the claim any truer.”
About ASTA
The mission of the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) is to facilitate the business of selling travel through effective representation, shared knowledge and the enhancement of professionalism. ASTA seeks a retail travel marketplace that is profitable and growing and a rewarding field in which to work, invest and do business.
About BTC
Founded in 1994, the mission of Business Travel Coalition is to interpret industry and government policies and practices and provide a platform so that the managed travel community can influence issues of strategic importance to their organizations.
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Dark Clouds and Hostage Data

Senior IT execs in the travel industry are starting to see dark clouds gather over  the always-on world of cloud computing, mobile apps and big data. Like Cereberus the three headed monster who guards the underworld there are three major threats that are beginning to rear their ugly heads to guard the gates to hell (or is it nirvana?):

·       Shifty Cloud Store Providers

·       Greedy Telcos

·       Data Hoarders

These threats need to be considered when moving travel technology infrastructure away from traditional service capabilities. So lets look at the situation piece by piece, assess the threats and then make smart decisions.

These Clouds don’t have Silver Linings

Part of the problem with cloud stores, which are still relatively new, are bad contracting, poor SLAs and vendors who have not done a good enough job on creating backup paths for the data and apps stored within the vendor’s cloud environment. Further, early cloud vendors have obviously been reading the GDS playbook and created contracts that make exit  or migration to another vendor very tough.

Are you hostage to your cloud computing vendor? The Washington Post's CIO Yuvinder (Yuvi) Kochar thinks you well could be and he is on a mission to get that changed. Three years ago, he spoke  with tech media site CIO Insight about the need for coherent price and license schemes for cloud services  http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Washington-Post-CTO-Yuvi-Kochar-Wants-Cloud-Vendors-to-Give-Him-an-Exit-Strategy-624540/?kc=CIOMINEPNL07112012  Now as the first few multi-year licenses have come up for renewal, Kochar raises concerns about ensuring open contract provisions are in place, which would help ease a migration from your current vendor to other vendors who may have new and innovative service provisions. We know that these provisions are a sore point for many a GDS user who has tried to ease the currently difficult migration from one vendor to another.

But that is not all, as many cloud users found to their dismay on the night of June 29th 2012, when a violent storm on the US east coast knocked out several large cloud providers. The cloud infrastructure, like any other hosted facility, can and will go down. But wasn't cloud computing supposed to be the end of all that risk, the panacea for users who were sick and tired of the vagaries of computing infrastructure?  So much for non-single point of failure.  http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57464342-71/modern-life-halted-as-netflix-pinterest-instagram-go-down/?utm_source=Room+77+Newsletter&utm_campaign=db60e7f0ba-Room_77_Outage_Update_6_30_20126_30_2012&utm_medium=email

Hotel newbie Room77 was one of the first to let their customers know about the problem. But this was a wake up call for all concerned that has sent users scrambling to look a their contracts and SLAs, because these contract and service provisions matter much more in a cloud environment.

Telecommunications Vendors as Robber Barons

Mobile users and BYOD (bring your own device) has generated a big swing to mobile (and by that I mean non fixed location) services. Just as everyone gets behind this – the users, the equipment manufacturers and the applications are all taking advantage of an unlimited wireless world. BUT there is that small matter of mobile data plans.

Consumers and business users alike are being besieged by greedy telcos who are  charging exorbitant rates for data roaming plans.  (Albeit this is subtle as most users have not seen the changes occur. The mobile providers change their contracts with such frequency that the users are truly confused and in the end most of them have not cared). This is caused by the twin problems of poor understanding by the user of their data plan pricing and very high levels of expectation set by – yes you guessed it – mobile telecommunications vendors. No TV commercial these days worth its salt will exclude the promise of steaming video to your mobile! How many of you have been stung by the problems of:

·       Slow mobile speeds

·       Blank data spots

·       High data plans costs

·       Usurious rates for international roaming

My point is clear – these are the real world and the promise from the mobile operators is far from realistic and of it can get course VERY expensive.

It's Mine (Data) and You Can't Have It!

The value of mining big data is seeing everyone  who is a data processor (and his mother) trying to get protective about the large volumes of data that passes through their infrastructure. In turn these data processors now think of their custodial duty no longer as just a cost but also as a money spinner for them

Data was once considered to be so difficult to mine that holders of data didn't mind sharing. Now that there are affordable and effective tools for manipulating big data, all of a sudden those controllers of data (note not the owners) are being really protective about access to  this data. They are hiding behind "privacy" and "security" concerns when what they really mean is that they want to get the commercial value from the data, and not give it to the ones who are smart enough to think of ways of using it. I don't want to belittle the issue of privacy and security concerns for personal data but there are very easy ways of managing those concerns.

As an example look at large scale data processors today who make considerable sums from the data they are processing. Imagine the chagrin of the GDS vendors who are about to see their current cash cows of MIDT contracts (the sale of travel agency behavior data back to the airlines) go out the window to newer smaller companies now able for far less cost can both capture and create useful information from this raw data.

So be warned out there. It looks like there is a new set of guardians on duty as a Gatekeeper. And we had all better take care. Be prepared to make the journey through the underworld to the blissful state of contentedness that the promises of Big Data and Cloud Computing should be taking us to. And that nasty looking puppy just might prevent you from getting there.

Cheers

The End of GDS Isolation. New Era of Openness?

Maybe its just me but I note a distinct change in the GDS rhetoric of late. And this is good for everyone.

The latest moves by the Legacy GDS players follows years of isolation by each of the GDSs who had developed different protocols for each user interaction from the basic IBM TPF/ALC command set. There has been a lot of prior art involved in the GDS interaction commands. I believe there is even a patent or two out there concerning how interaction with the GDS takes place. In 1988 I led a team that developed PARS Manager an application that allowed screen highlighting it was originally developed for any GDS but was implemented for PARS. IBM’s PC Travel was actually a neutral application with different command sets for each airline and GDS. PC Travel was replaced by ACSA (here is a reference to it http://www-01.ibm.com/software/htp/tpf/news/archive/v6n2a08.htm )

So this is not new. What is new is that the GDSs themselves are now promoting their “Open”ness. The GDSs are coming into the market joining LUTE’s CommandPRO (sm) in offering flexible command sets inbound any host direct or indirect based on Farelogix’s Hawkeye Opensource licensed product.

First up is Tripcase from Sabre http://www.tripcase.com/travelsmarter/. This will take in ANY itinerary object in the same way as Tripit and others already do. Sabre is promoting this and has already signed several agents to work with this. At the Travel Technolog Europe/Business Travel joint shows in London HRG revealed that they were a customer of Tripcase. Over on the other side of the hall, Travelport was not to be outdone. It was out there calling a spade a spade. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. The Smartpoint App now offers any GDS input talking to the Travelport Hosts. http://www.travelportsmartpointapp.com/ An yes.. they still have 3 of their own that need to be spoken to. These are Worldspan, Apollo (US) and Galileo (Rest of the World).

So far no word from Amadeus but Amadeus One could easily be adapted with a neutral set of command inputs.

Perhaps we should have Kirk and Spock as the spokepersons for these new apps . I think we can have the universal desktop/api - er I mean - communicator!

Let’s hope that this results in a better service for agents and thereby a better service for the consumer at large?

Am I optimistic? I dont think actually that this will happen. It takes a VERY LONG TIME for a Leopard to change his spots.

Cheers

The Professor's 2012 Predictions

It's that most wonderful time of the year. The Professor has dusted off his crystal ball and peered into it.

This year, I am seeing a lot of change and disruption. 2011 was a bad year for the integrity of the travel world, and 2012 will be no better. So here are some of my key predictions; in fact this is my top 10. I am not going to rank them - they are all equally likely to happen. The impact will vary on where in the food chain you live. So here goes:

1. More Regulation - yes re-regulation by stealth and through the front door will occur. Much of this will be consumer focused. Much of it will also be revenue focused. States are struggling with their financial obligations and so taxes will increase.

2. Less Competition- this might seem strange but I see much less competition in key areas that matter. Less competition among airlines for example in the USA where the number of airlines has shrunk to the point where competition is almost non-existent. Prices are going to rise for travel. The golden age of competitive pricing for airlines and cheap airfares are over. One bright spot is that the long haul traffic in the Gulf State airlines will continue to create value for long haul traffic - in the back of the bus. Low cost carriers will continue to eat away at legacy airlines’ market share. Some of these legacy players are going to suffer badly that in turn leads to short term improvement but long term reduction. Travelport’s Agility program is another example of companies trying to extract more money out of … ultimately the consumer. The lack of true competition in distribution enables them to do that.

3. More fragmentation of the user experience. Think of the current Hipmunk type change as version 1.0 of lipstick on the front end of the pig. In 2012 we will see a lot more innovation coming in the UX. However many of the players will be pretenders to the throne. Many players will be attacking the user interface without understanding the complexity of product requirements and the sophistication of the users. Developers will continue to mistake UI for UX.

4. Availability state will become a top problem to be dealt with - specifically quality and speed of results. Finally the current generation of cache results will be exposed for the poor quality they provide. However this will not deter practically every travel vendor from demanding a source of cache availability. At the same time the suppliers will be demanding more and more discrete transactions; i.e., tell me who you are and what you want, and only then will I tell you what you can have. This battle is going to heat up in 2012.

5. Google Flight Search will be a mixed bag. It will launch internationally but won’t be very good and certain significant airlines will not participate. Google’s inability to display discounted fares internationally will condemn them to be just like Expedia’s UK product – only partial in its delivery. The boycotting by several airlines such as Lufthansa will be marked by slow adoption of the Google Flight Search product by consumers. Google itself will start to feel the heat from regulators and users alike. No more will it be the “do no evil Mr nice guy”.

6. More dynamic based pricing. This is a longer-term trend. The move away from fixed and predictable pricing will be an early trend. Tools that have made the pricing more transparent will be harder to use and the gaming of the systems by users, meta search and supply/sellers alike will make the task of knowing pricing harder and harder for the user. This is a double-edged sword. The lack of reference based consistent pricing results in Consumers searching (unnecessarily) harder than they do today costing more in real search assets and costs. If there was true dynamic pricing – then the search would be different. Today the searching of approx. 6 guaranteed but different pricing causes confusion. IE we might as well move away from fixed pricing. Unbundling will continue. (See #1 above).

7. We will see a wave of apps ported back onto PCs as search on tablets and smartphones becomes the biggest obstacle to app adoption. Already many sellers and providers of travel information are seeing low returns on their mobile efforts. Much of this can be laid at the door of the poor tools for search in the mobile environment. As such to get better search – SEO and SEM – all round many app providers will port back their apps into the Browser and PC/Mac worlds. Google must be rubbing its hands in glee at the thought.

8. Tablets get better and broader adoption but applications that are truly useful for basic travel – like search – don’t match the devices. Yes more and more of us will be using tablets. Windows 8 will have a big impact as it will be the first really unified fully functional service platform. Android is showing that it’s a pain to work with and unstable. Google will need to balance the need for openness with the requirement and expectation of stability. So many apps, so little time(!) will become an over-arching problem for app developers. The lack of quality of many apps out there will start to show how slipshod and lazy developers have been. However we will still see squillions of poor quality apps coming into the market, and more unhappy companies who commissioned such efforts and but are not realizing any returns.

9. Big Data will have a big impact with more people attacking core problems of infrastructure than ever before. Those who oppose them will be under tremendous pressure. Specifically the structure and economic models of Gatekeepers such as GDSs will start to show their difficulties. Think of a world of smart ITA wannabes who actually attack successfully tough data problems. Be afraid – very afraid if you have a large IT infrastructure.

10. The patent wars will hit travel. I wish I didn’t have to make this prediction, but I believe the current state of the Phone Patent Wars are but a precursor to the wars that are going to affect travel. Already we see Patent Trolls beginning to send snotgrams (aka legal letters) to the world of travel. Yes – this one is likely to have a chilling affect on the development of travel as a whole. Ignorance is not bliss and what you don’t know will hurt you.

And now some rather obvious non-predictions:

1. 2012 is not the year of mobile in travel (that happened a few years back in case you missed it)

2. Social fatigue will set in. People will get bored with messing around with Social apps. Too many, too wasteful.

3. The GDSs won’t die in 2012. However they will see even more share erosion. Amadeus will get really strong and Travelport will get weaker. Sabre will stay relatively quiet

4. Several high profile startups will run out of cash and will fade away or become zombies. There will significant culling in certain sectors such as trip management.

5. Apple’s first efforts will hit travel

6. Google will not be top of everybody’s fave list

7. Google and Facebook won’t merge

8. Facebook will IPO and it WILL be awesome

9. There will be a lot of startups coming into travel. More investors will eye travel and conclude it’s too expensive, too complex and full of a lot of Looney Tunes.

10. And there will be even more conferences than last year.

With that –may I wish you and yours a very Happy Holidays from the Professor and all of us (well OK it’s just me, the dog and the cat) deep in the heart of our secret lair somewhere in Washington State.

Feel free to comment. And catch you all in 2012. I will try and be better about posting. I suggest you follow me on Twitter where despite my dislike of the service - I am a reluctant participant.

Cheers!

And just one note of thanks to the literally thousands of you have have read, mused, commented, cursed, prasied and otherwise consumed the Professor's Wisdom in 2011.

And thanks to Sodahead for the image.

US DoJ Gets Tough On Anti-Trust

The US Department of Justice is finally waking up from a long slumber and wasting no time in putting some teeth into the enforcement of anti-Trust legislation.

First up - they are likely to deny the merger between NASDAQ and NYSE Eurnext. Next they are likely to deny the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.

What does this mean in travel?

There are 3 major issues on the table today.

First Google - there is now strong evidence that Google will be the target and eventual recipient of stringent anti-Trust measures. It has already paid fines for bad behavior - such as criminal charges related to the Pharma ads issue, This will have big issues going forward for hotels and air activity

Second - GDS behavior. With the protagonists agreeing to a time out for 3-4 months - this moves the Justice Dept's investigation into a common time line with the various lawsuits. With Travelport looking to address its financial woes - a GDS merger is decidedly off the table.

Third for any additional airline merger - the DoJ is going to pour cold water on that. By now any assessment of the situation will see that pricing power has returned to the airlines driven by scarce supply. Thus any additional airline merger type activity will not be viewed favorably in my opinion. that said - the DoJ and the DoT clashed several times on this subject and the DoT won.

Bottom line here folks... be careful what you wish for...

Cheers

Sabre's Mobile Study Sends Message To Mothership

Sabre has updated its mobile traveller study.

While the study sample size is in my view woefully small and the questions leave a lot to be desired (bundling of search and buy for example), it has some interesting messages for dear old mother Sabre GDS business and Sabresonic PSS business. I found the comments put forward by the head of the STINGroup Chris Kroeger interesting. A case perhaps of physician heal thyself. Here are the quotes that seem to me to make Sabre want to change some of the things that it does.

“Our survey shows that business travel today is personal. Travelers want the same functionality and convenience from their business travel tools that they have in their daily lives. People use travel services on their smart phones everyday and for every trip – before, during and after they travel,”

“The corporate travel industry needs to keep pace with the services and apps that travelers can access in their personal life and incorporate those into the world of managed business travel.”

“One of the biggest trends we see in the survey data is travelers’ desire for local business information and offerings based on their location via their smartphone or tablet,”

“Travelers will look for this information from suppliers, travel management companies and technology resources such as online booking tools like GetThere. Smart and savvy travel management companies will use technology as a way to fill this need and improve customer support and solidify customer loyalty. ”

“Today’s business travelers expect transactional capabilities from their mobile devices including buying air extras and in-flight amenities,”

“Tomorrow’s business travelers will move from physical passports, wallets and credit cards and will expect their mobile device to fill those needs as continued advancements in mobile payment, commerce and banking make it easier to electronically transact via mobile devices.”

Looking at this tells me that as a current Gatekeeper, The Dallas based company needs to look carefully at three major changes:

1. Providing content to its customers.
2. Mobilizing its applications
3. Removing onerous commercial terms to its users and suppliers alike.

So Sabre - consider this - the advice was free, the impact would be profound.

OK Break over back to the marketplace....

Cheers

TripAdvisor - Rational Decision or?

In February of 2010 Expedia's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was busy denying the IPO or spin out of Trip Advisor. Oh what a difference a year makes. Announced today after the markets closed on the US East Coast Expedia Inc announced the split of the company into two entities.

it is interesting considering the parentage of Expedia as a Baby Bill spin off from Microsoft. Today Microsoft is struggling having fallen behind both Google and Apple in tech stock value. Perhaps it should split up... but I digress.

One can speculate as to what has been in mind with the future of the Expedia family - but someone needs to get value because the stock is getting its ass kicked by the smaller PCLN.

But what do the analysts say? Well the jury is out. The move has been expected for quite some time so in my view the value of Trip Advisor has already been factored in.

Quoting the first guy to come out and put out a research note on this who is Deutsche Bank's Herman Leung - he is being cautious and maintaining a short term value of $25 and says HOLD. He argues that the bears would have a 9x valuation at the low end to bulls who could go as high as 15X. Pretty broad spread but understandable. I wont steal his thunder.

In my view there is the devil you know and the devil you don't know. I concur with his analysis that TA's yields are better and therefore the multiple for the TA business should be higher than that of the residual transaction based business. It tells me that there is a certain fear that competing with PCLN on a direct basis will actually see Expedia's value drop in an apple to apple comparison. This may have been one reason why EXPE has been holding onto TA for so long.

Now that the company has done quite a few things to shore up their core business to wit:
Partnering in Asia Pac with Air Asia.
Using Cleartrip to power domestic India
Coming to terms with AA
Abandoning the pure GDS based supply model for Air

Now therefore would be a good time to give some opportunity to eke out some better equity value.

For Trip Advisor this is good. Steve and the team will now be free to ply their own wares. one thing to think about will be an Air Search engine. Will they go the me too route with Kayak with ITA or native ITA or will they be bold and go with a Vayant or an Everbread. Even develop their own directly or with a third party group.

The possibilities are broad and this can shake things up in search.

Of course one key question will be how they handle community with positive relationship with Facebook or will they try and challenge the Dentist's son's juggernaut.

Questions indeed

Cheers


With thanks to Strawberry Walrus website.

US OTA Transactions decline in January

There will be a fair amount of spin going on about this news.

ARC's January 2011 detailed breakdown of transactions shows a decline in Online Travel Agency activity when compared to last year.

After the significant jumps in 2010 over 2011 - we can expect a moderating level of activity but the fall was unexpected.

Clearly something is going on.

One can expect that with Orbitz and Expedia both making up a high percentage of the US OTA market and both having lowered or reduced activity on AA that there would be some effect. But I think that the fall is higher than I would have anticipated when compared to the over sectors of the market. (Corporate and general retail).

I think that the impact of the OTA's battle with AA and the resultant shift to meta search traffic sites such as Kayak and of course to AA direct is now becoming apparent.

Next month's traffic with things becoming stabilized will be an interesting statistic

Cheers

Bad Search and Not Fair Search. Quality and Reference Point Matters

There has been a lot of talk about consumer fair search and the value of the travel agent in the mix.

The rhetoric is loud and raucous on both sides. Let me make one thing completely clear - the Professor is WHOLE HEARTED in his support of the agency community. I firmly believe that the neutral channel is viable - indeed essential - in today's environment. However where I differ from the so called Open Allies Group is that I believe that the tools provided into the market are bad - IE Legacy GDS solutions are just inadequate and fail to provide the consumer choice. The old story of GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT applies no more clearly than in Travel Agent Search Tools from the legacy GDSs.

The value an agent is supposed to bring to the consumer is that he can interpret the possible results and help the consumer to make the best choice possible. But what if the tools he uses are not that good? Is the consumer then best served?

To illustrate my point here are 3 different results sets from Delta.com, Orbitz and LUTE Technologies Agent tool YuFares powered by Everbread.

The query is the same and should therefore represent the same basic result no matter what. My designated query here was as follows:

Seattle to London - simple roundtrip
Outbound Feb 6th
Inbound March 18th
Price led search

However the results shown here are constrained by certain parameters.

Let's look at the airline direct result first. Delta.com - I use this site a lot because I fly DL a lot. However I know the constraints on the site. For example in this display I want see what I can get. There are 20 results. The shortest elapsed time in the 20 results that Delta.com returned to me was 23 hour and 45 mins. The longest time was 35 hours 17 mins with a 22 hour and 10 min layover. The price range of the results was from $731.70 to $758.70


NOTE I believe that Delta uses the Travelport search system. Travelport also owns Galileo and Worldspan and is currently embroiled in a legal fight with American Airlines.

Next I looked at Orbitz. This is the master Orbitz site in the USA. Same search parameters. After getting the master display - I used the Delta only results - there are considerably more possibilities that I could have chosen. According to Orbitz it gave me 24 Delta specific choices (including code shares and interline with partner results -AF and KL). The time line ranged from 12 hours 30 to 15 hours 20 and the price ranged from $756 to $1934.



Note: I believe that Orbitz uses the ITA Software engine. ITA Software is involved in a takeover by Google. Orbitz is embroiled in a fight with AA and is 48% owned by Travelport.

So finally I looked at one of our clients LUTE Technologies whose product YuFares uses the Everbread engine for B2B and B2C customers. The version I used was open and used the B2C standard interface. I will ignore that B2B Agent version as this found fares cheaper than the previous sites with some complexity. While the complexity of the trip was within the boundaries of what the other sites found and would be normal for an agent to offer a customer - I thought it would be fairer to use the untuned version as the results were within acceptable boundaries.

The system returned 111 results of which it displayed 15. The timeline range was from 12 hours 30 to 16 hours. The price range was from $769 to $887.



Note: I investigated the results for each of the hosts and I can see that Worldspan which powers Orbitz actually constructs a lower fare than the LUTE results. For the LUTE results - the engine can choose from any GDS - so I selected a different GDS to highlight the difference. In this case I used the Amadeus GDS for availability options. When switching the engine to the different host - LUTE and Orbitz match. I indeed checked this on ITA's own mobile app and it too confirmed the results.

The clear conclusion one can draw is that for a simple search the results can vary rapidly. The fact that Delta seems to use an inferior tool for its search results is something that Delta will have to address as they go through the process of upgrading its site. For Orbitz (ITA) and the LUTE Technologies (Everbread) engines - it can be seen that the consumer benefits from a better tool.

Based on the results: -

Who had the cheapest fare?
The airline

Who had the optimized search?
Orbitz and LUTE tie with a nudge to Orbitz for the cheaper fare using Worldspan (See note above on host systems).

Who had the best elapsed flight timea?
LUTE and Orbitz tie

Who returned the fastest result?
Lute by a hair. Orbitz near enough as a tie. Airline result was much slower.

Clearly if the legacy GDS is the system powering these results then one has to ask - what is fair search?

If you evaluate the consumer position would the consumer actually make a decision that has him sitting at an airport for nearly 24 hours to save a whole $23.70. That would easily get consumed in a few trips to the airport junk food court.

The possible results from availability differences are clear. If you use the GDS tools then you are likely to see different results as each GDS is constrained in what it can provide as a set of results. It is not that the answers are not there - it is that the GDS cannot display all the spectrum of possible answers. Newer technologies such as ITA and the YuFares powered results clearly demonstrate this. The brute force solution of lowest fare no matter what shows that there is a subtle case for displaying results based on business rules. The legacy GDSs cannot do that.

I hope that this adds to the debate and puts the issues of search in context. In my view search is not a simple thing and by now anyone who has taken more than 5 minutes to assess the situation must understand that Available Airfare search is a pretty hard and complex thing. From a consumer perspective with all this complexity - Google making an entrance can be seen as positive.

For the consumer the issue of search is cannot be just about price. But making an informed decision in a transparent manner is not trivial. The chorus of those who say that the legacy GDS is the be all and end all needs to get real about the issue. The issue of Direct Connect should be about quality of result and service to the consumer. Sadly that seems to have been forgotten. All these organizations claiming that legacy GDS powered results are essential to the framework of freedom of choice is pure hogwash. I don't think there is any 1950s/60s technology that should - or should I say COULD - ever make that claim. GDSs can do somethings really well. Search just happens not to be one of them.

So what do you think?