American Express Business Travel this month announced automated ticket repricing, reissuing and refunding, powered by Worldspan's Rapid Reprice technology. Amex said the new Quick Exchange tool enables U.S. agents to expedite itinerary changes and allows them to handle greater transaction volumes.
Noting it is "the first global travel management company to implement automated ticket re-pricing and refunding in the U.S. across all its [global distribution system] booking platforms," American Express wrote in a press statement that the tool returns "a new ticket with the applicable fares, taxes, penalties, or administrative fees together with additional collections or returns" and "integrates with American Express' centralized ticket database to improve tracking of unused and refundable tickets."
"Perhaps most importantly," according to American Express Business Travel North America service delivery network senior vice president Julie Bottner, the tools would "help our clients to recapture or avoid the potential for dollars lost when unused tickets expire and refunds go unreturned."
TMC officials have said that as many as half of business travel plans are altered, requiring a ticket change about 10 percent of the time.
Some Worldspan airline clients have applied Rapid Reprice across different reservation systems, but Worldspan chief information officer Sue Powers confirmed that Amex is the first TMC to do so using multiple GDSs. "They send us an XML message with all the information regarding the ticket that was issued--a copy of the record, so to speak--and the change that needs to be made," said Powers. "We use our historical database and processing to determine the new price, send that back to them and they store that in the ticket. Amex has done some innovative work on their side to make that work in multiple GDSs."
Rapid Reprice works "behind the scenes," Powers said, and "agents, to a certain extent, wouldn't know it's happening."
An Amex spokesperson was unable to provide additional details before press time. Powers was not aware of any Amex effort to make the functions available to travelers through corporate-travel self-booking tools.
Worldspan has invested more than "460,000 man-hours in Rapid Reprice technologies since 1996" and "nearly 70,000 Rapid Reprice transactions are performed daily by existing customers," according to a press statement.
Upcoming enhancements include "reissuing a reissue," which would help increase the percentage of requests that can be handled in an automated fashion, Powers said. At this point, 95 percent of change requests can be handled without manual intervention. Partial refunds requested during a trip also still require human assistance.
Among other global distribution systems, Sabre Travel Network's Quick Refunds and Exchanges product "automatically re-prices changed itineraries and calculates refunds due or additional payments owed by travelers [and] supports all points of sale, all airlines and all itineraries, including both domestic and international tickets," according to a spokesperson.
Meanwhile, Galileo does not have a tool like Rapid Reprice, executives said in December. It's one of the Worldspan technologies that they plan to integrate into Galileo's systems when their mergercloses, which is expected in this year's third quarter. Worldspan last year integrated Rapid Reprice with its Go agent desktop solution. Separately, Galileo this week said it enhanced its Viewpoint graphical desktop for agents, for the first time including its "complete pricing" function, hotel leisure rates and advanced passenger information.
Galileo sibling company Orbitz for Business, also owned by Travelport, nearly two years ago said its use of the Worldspan Rapid Reprice tool helped save one large Midwest client $1.3 million annually--largely by avoiding agency transaction fees and tracking unused e-tickets. Orbitz for Business officials at the time said calls for such changes--representing about one-third of all calls--dropped by more than half after the technology was implemented.
A Carlson Wagonlit Travel spokesperson said CWT since 2003 has offered automated ticket changes on non-GDS bookings made through its Symphonie system.
According to a statement attributed to Dee Runyan, BCD Travel executive vice president of products, technology and supplier relations, "We use a number of different solutions to manage refunds and exchanges. All the GDSs offer some form of automated exchange processing. Some of those tools are more robust than others, and we augment those applications with other technologies, as appropriate. BCD Travel can work with any of these tools if it makes sense for a particular customer."