Slowing
fourth-quarter booking growth, particularly in Western Europe, this week was
highlighted by a pair of global distribution firms during third-quarter
earnings calls.
Travelport
reported European global distribution segments grew 5 percent year-over-year
for the three months ending Sept. 30, though CEO Jeff Clarke this week reported
a slowdown so far in the fourth quarter.
Travelport
highlighted particular strength in the Asia/Pacific region and the corporate
travel market, where segments grew 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in
the third quarter. Third-quarter segments, meanwhile, were flat in the United
States and Middle East.
Growth
in worldwide GDS segments, however, has slowed throughout 2010—down to 3
percent in the third quarter from 5 percent in the first half of the year. That
has continued into the current period. "We're seeing flat
growth in the Americas and Europe, versus 5 percent growth we saw in the third
quarter in Europe and flat growth in the U.S.," Clarke told investors this
week during the company's third-quarter earnings call.
Clarke
attributed the worldwide slowdown in October in part to one less weekday versus
October 2009. "We'll do a little over a million bookings a working day and
about 200,000 bookings on a Saturday or Sunday," Clarke explained.
Amadeus,
meanwhile, claimed that its share of global travel agency airline bookings
during the first nine months of 2010 edged upward by 0.1 percentage points year
over year to 36.1 percent, which CEO David Jones described as "highly
satisfactory" given various pricing pressures, notably strong competition
by Travelport. The marketshare shift, according to Amadeus, resulted from a 9.5
percent increase in agency airline bookings, which was 0.6 percentage points
higher than overall GDS industry growth.
Speaking this
week to analysts about Amadeus' financial performance, Jones said the marginal
uptick in marketshare came despite the relative "underperformance" of
Western Europe's travel agency volumes versus the world average. It also has
been "a period when the pricing pressure from our competitors has been
strong, and it therefore has been tough to move customers," Jones said.
Year-to-date agency airline booking volume through Sept. 30 increased by 6.2
percent in Western Europe from 2009 levels, officials said, a lower percentage
than in any other region.
"Travelport
are defending their position very vigorously, as one would expect," Jones
added. "This is one of the factors why our marketshare growth has been
less than we ideally would have hoped to achieve. Under the circumstances, this
is actually not a bad result at all. But there are one or two areas where we
would have liked to make more progress."