Major airlines are looking at third parties beyond Prism Group both for aggregation of corporate client data and decision support related to developing contract goals. US Airways is rumored to be close to settling on ARC as its data aggregator, following British Airways' decision this summer to replace Prism with TRX Inc.
United Airlines confirmed that Prism is not the sole provider of decision support. In a statement to BTN, the carrier said, "All primary forecasting and contracting tools are provided by Prism, but sometimes we use multiple resources to analyze customer travel trends and that includes Cobra, Travel Analytics and our own internal resources."
In British Airways' case, Trilogy was selected for internal decision support (BTN, Aug. 11).
Eclipse Advisors' Corporate Opportunity and Business Risk Analyzer has been positioned since last summer as one of several tools airlines can employ to create contractual targets and measure corporate contract performance (BTN, July 15, 2002).
United, meanwhile, defused rumors that it is loosening its mandatory policy requiring corporate clients to transmit data to Prism for aggregation. Such data aggregation by third parties has been the source of much debate that continued this month in discussions at the National Business Travel Association convention in Dallas.
"Given the structure of the airline industry, some of you may feel that there is not much choice, but do not give up hope," said Bechtel corporate travel services manager Dave Weaver, who also co-chairs NBTA's data privacy task force, referring to BA's decision. "When you talk to the airlines one on one, they listen loud and clear, and we have seen some change that goes right to the part of choice."
Though US Airways did not respond to inquiries regarding a potential ARC relationship, ARC director of emerging markets Barry Lemley told NBTA delegates that new tools in development will empower airline sales reps and promote equal access to data. "We like the idea of a shared-risk, shared-access, trusted and neutral concept," Lemley said. "I am not sure we can ever have a data aggregator that fully takes care of the need of both players, but that is the role we are trying to play here."
The issue for many—including several travel managers attending the data privacy session at the NBTA convention who stated their refusal to sign airline contracts mandating data transmission to a third party—is not the specific third party but the process defined by the carriers. "I do not know any other industry in which I have to give reporting on what competitors are doing," said one dissenting procurement professional.
Ongoing sticking points for many include the requirement to include information on city pairs in which the relevant carrier does not currently fly, a general refusal by airlines to show buyers exactly what they receive from third-party data aggregators, a perceived inability on the part of airline sales reps to stray from headquarters' policy on data requirements, a lack of data transmission standards and confusion around the value provided to corporate accounts.
"A lot of people have chosen to villainize the data aggregator rather than the airlines themselves, and that really makes no sense to me," said Tanya Pope, vice president of travel technology and operations at Viacom Corp.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of corporate accounts with U.S. airlines that use a data aggregator, primarily Prism, have agreed to transmit their data. At Delta, for example, the latest carrier to subcontract with Prism (BTN, Dec. 9, 2002), more than 90 percent of accounts already are sending data through Prism, according to Prism vice president Les Baker. Baker also told BTN his company is consolidating data for 3,200 companies, representing 180 million transactions.