Delta Aims At Atlantic Traffic

<B> Delta Aims At Atlantic Traffic</B>

By Amon Cohen

Delta Air Lines is taking big strides to win conference and incentive business to and from Europe. In the United States, it has just launched US, a meetings joint-sales drive with alliance partners Sabena, Swissair and Austrian Airlines. In Europe, it is preparing to launch its long-established Stateside branded meetings product, called Delta Meeting Network.

DMN Europe will launch in the United Kingdom and Italy on Aug. 1, and in Germany and France on Sept. 1, with more European countries to follow next year.

The launch of DMN Europe replaces a general groups department which until now, said Nigel McShine-Jones, European sales development executive for conference and incentives at Delta, handled everything from "ten buddies off to play golf to 300 Hewlett-Packard executives going to a sales meeting."

DMN Europe also looks likely to propel Delta overnight from its position as one of the worst airlines in Europe for meetings business to one of the best. Last year, John Fisher, managing director of British meetings organizer Page & Moy Marketing, branded Delta as the least helpful scheduled airline for meeting buyers.

He told U.K. publication Conference & Incentive Travel, that "Delta seems to be tied up in red tape. It insists on having names of passengers four weeks before departure and on charging for cancellations. The policy appears to be set in the United States and the U.K. does not have the authority to change it."

In Fisher's opinion, an airline that demands names in advance and refuses to waive cancellation fees does not understand the corporate meetings industry, where details of a trip and the group members are rarely settled until the 11th hour.

"What he said was fair comment," acknowledged Delta's McShine-Jones. "It is exactly that type of feedback that is one of the reasons why we are launching DMN Europe."

The main change under the program is that booking requests for Delta meetings groups will no longer have to be sent through to Atlanta for approval. This will give the European team much more flexibility in its dealings with groups. Deadlines for supplying passenger names will depend on seasonal loads, but will certainly be shorter than four weeks. And cancellations will be free until a specified time before departure rather than 30 days after booking, as was the case even for reservations made a year in advance.

As well as making good on issues of this type, DMN Europe also will attempt to exploit Delta's particular strengths. Chief among these is that it is the largest carrier across the Atlantic, with 63 daily departures from 29 European destinations. DMN Europe hopes to tap an increasing demand for pan-European meeting quotes by allowing full flexibility on assembly traffic, the industry term for meetings delegates arriving from multiple destinations. In Europe, the common principle is that a group has to comprise at least 10 people before qualifying for an air discount. With assembly traffic, there usually have to be a minimum of five passengers from any given destination before they qualify for the overall group discount. DMN Europe has decreed that even one person traveling on his own from, say, Spain will qualify, so long as the total pan-European group is of a reasonable size.

Delta also is planning to be flexible for meeting planners bringing in delegates from both sides of the Atlantic to a single meeting. "If they are bringing travelers from the U.S. and Europe, we could handle that with one quote," said McShine-Jones.

The launch of DMN Europe--which Delta claims is the first branded airline meeting product in Europe--met with full approval from Hogg Robinson international events manager Peter Baptie.

"It is without doubt an excellent idea," he said, "and will make it much easier to talk to them. Recognizing the international conference and incentive marketplace and putting people in on the ground is good for them, and equally good for us. I think it will give them a lot of business."

Although impressed with the new Delta offering, Baptie has been wary of the lip service he has been getting in recent months from other carriers. "Airlines have been putting the right names on their business cards and making the right noises, but I am not convinced that they totally understand," he said.

Issues on which Baptie would like to see more movement from carriers are: making more effort to partition groups in economy cabins, even to the extent of leaving some seats unsold; providing pre-checkin and pre-allocation of seats; and generally recognizing that meetings business has different needs than transient travel.

"I suspect they look at their yields and say that in a sense the value of the business does not merit special attention," Baptie said. "What they do not realize is that this is one of the fastest-growing areas of the business travel market, and these passengers will be coming back in their own right as business travelers."

Baptie claimed that Hogg has seen its meetings business shoot up 25 to 30 percent over the last year and estimated that the entire market has witnessed double-digit growth for the last three years.

Although agreeing with him that business is buoyant, Singapore Airlines U.K. travel officer Valerie Lowry discounted Baptie's suggestion that airlines do not rate meetings traffic highly. "It is good business for us because we can block off seats in advance and get cash up front," she said. "It is still a seller's market and we are certainly not quoting low rates. But we are aware of the competition, so we are quoting competitively."

McShine-Jones said he also regards meetings traffic as a reasonably good yield, especially with a growing number traveling in business class. However, he pointed out that U.S. corporations looking to buy group seats from Europe could be in for a pleasant surprise. "Our marketplace is completely different in Europe, so needless to say, we will be much more competitive," he said.