In an effort to further broaden its reach into non-airline
travel categories, payment supplier Universal Air Travel Plan is exploring "multiple
solutions to maximize" its network, UATP officials this month told BTN. Possible avenues include partnerships
with credit card networks or other suppliers, as well as the continued development
of virtual cards.
"We're not currently accepted from a pure UATP network
perspective for anything in a broad case as far as hotel and car rentals,"
said UATP vice president of global sales K. David Holmes. "So we have a
challenge there."
One concept, according to Holmes, is partnering with a
credit card network provider—MasterCard, for example—to generate one-time-use
card numbers, which would be associated with a particular air transaction to "power
a transaction that wouldn't necessarily or traditionally flow over the UATP
network," like a hotel booking or rental car reservation.
"We are touring some options to deliver some of these
solutions to market," Holmes said. "That would allow us to expand
more of the travel experience in that [clients] can bill things centrally, like
hotels and car rental, as part of the air travel package which we do initially."
While the company is exploring new connections, it already
has partnerships with payment solution eNett International and the La Quinta
Inn & Suites hotel chain. Through eNett's Virtual Account Number solution
(formerly vNett), UATP can issue single-use, 16-digit virtual cards for
clients. Although the partnership has been in place since 2009, UATP has yet to
launch a customer for the capability, but still hopes to "bring people
onto that platform," said UATP vice president of marketing and
communications Wendy Ward.
"We're talking to carriers and corporate subscribers
about enabling UATP broader usage over the eNett solution," Holmes said. "Some
discussions are ongoing, but we expect to have some of those announcements
within 2014."
UATP's partnership with La Quinta allows organizations to
centrally bill payments to La Quinta. Walmart in 2010 became the first client
to utilize the solution.
UATP is exploring similar relationships with other
suppliers. "The last option is looking at those partnerships, whether that's
via the eNett platform for the T&E card, or what other partnership
opportunities are out there for us to expand the utility of the UATP network
from the T&E perspective," Holmes said.
Language Update
Meanwhile UATP this summer added Chinese "passenger
name decoding" to its DataStream and DataMine reporting systems, so users
can search for tickets by entering a passenger's name in Chinese. "This is
great because we have Shandong and China Eastern [airlines] within China that
are issuers, and we have Air China as a marketing partner," Ward
said.
Additionally, UATP in August began providing online DataMine
help screen shots in Portuguese and Spanish.