Ericsson is now the first major corporation to acknowledge that American Airlines' EveryFare program played a part in its choice of travel management company.
"It was the icing on the cake" as part of the company's decision to select TQ3 Maritz Travel Solutions, said Ericsson U.S. travel manager Meade Hubby. Impressed with TQ3's "total solution," including fulfillment services to support the Amadeus E-Travel booking tool, the company will switch next month after three years with Rosenbluth International. "Certain people have overplayed it, but certainly the fact that a lot of fares are no longer eligible for a corporate discount means the EveryFare discounts on Y and Q fares offer attractive cost savings." With North American headquarters in Plano, Texas, Ericsson is a big American Airlines user out of Dallas Fort Worth.
"EveryFare is limited in scope versus other multitasking-type of engines that can search multiple sites, but, of course, there are legal issues on screen scraping," said Chicago-area Consulting Strategies principal Mark Walton. "I would tout it if I was TQ3, but is it a meaningful enough advantage? Sure, if everything else is equal."
AA earlier this month linked EveryFare
(BTN, Feb. 10) to its legal dispute with New York-based FareChase in that, "among other harms, the FareChase software hurts the company's ability to offer Web fares as an incentive to use lower-cost distribution systems," the basic premise of its EveryFare program. The statement came as AA announced its gratification with a ruling in the 67th State District Court of Texas in which Judge Don Cosby issued a temporary injunction stopping FareChase from scraping aa.com for fares and inventory. While FareChase is considering an appeal, a permanent injunction trial was set for July 7.
AA said it "filed suit against FareChase in July after repeated requests to stop searching aa.com were ignored, in violation of the terms and conditions of the Web site." Sabre had intervened in the case on behalf of FareChase to oppose the temporary injunction. The GDS company is one of several FareChase licensees in corporate travel, including Amadeus' E-Travel subsidiary, American Express, Outtask and Worldspan.
"The Web fares found on aa.com are widely available to the public and are not private property," said FareChase senior vice president Krista Pappas. "We firmly believe that once the airlines post their airfares publicly, consumers have the right to use comparison shopping tools. This temporary injunction is a setback, but we are going to aggressively fight it."
Other carriers, including Southwest
(BTN, Sept. 23, 2002), have considered action on screen scrapers and are paying close attention to the litigation. "We're watching AA-FareChase with great interest," said Bill Brunger, vice president of distribution planning and revenue decision support at Continental Airlines. "We get to choose who uses our information and how. We have stopped people from scraping, but we have also licensed other people to scrape."
Meanwhile, TQ3 Maritz said a test among seven clients with varying volumes, policies and historical AA usage between Nov. 14 and Dec. 13 revealed an average of 7 percent in savings from EveryFare, "compared to corresponding GDS published rates." Savings "ranged from as high as 15 percent to as low as 5 percent," the agency announced. The number of AA Web fares purchased also varied, said TQ3, "from 219 for a $30 million client in an AA market with a policy encouraging nonrefundable tickets to two transactions for a $4 million client outside an AA market with no policy requiring or encouraging the use of nonrefundable tickets."
TQ3 said AA Web fares purchased included Y and Q class fares that were 5 percent lower than published Y and Q fares, as well as others in various markets that were an average of 15 percent lower than their published counterparts. "Where applicable," TQ3 said, "clients with an AA contract were allowed to use their corporate discount, as well as the lower Web fare for even greater savings."
A TQ3 marketing manager said more than a dozen clients are using EveryFare. Participation increases client transaction fees on all carriers, by $1 at TQ3, per the terms of AA's EveryFare agreement.