Galileo First To Upgrade Negotiated Faring Via ATPCO

Galileo International has won the race to take advantage of new fare filing capabilities offered by the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. and, in turn, to improve the application of corporate volume agreements for North American travel. Galileo officials said the new GlobalFares product also allows it to display all new fares minutes, rather than hours, after ATPCO issues them, which happens three times a day. ATPCO is the organization to which airlines file fares and from which global distribution systems get them.

Galileo and other GDSs have been working to incorporate changes by ATPCO designed to improve the accuracy of the percentage-based discount and flat fares that airlines commonly negotiate with corporations (BTN, Nov. 6, 2000). While the traditional practice has been for agents to apply the appropriate discount to the published fare--which is not guaranteed and is subject to the airline's audit--that process long ago was deemed cumbersome, inefficient and inaccurate. Now, Galileo can show agents the fares after the discount has been applied, as filed by the airlines to ATPCO in the first place. The system also automatically applies any rules that govern discounts, such as the waiving of a restriction.

"This should nearly eliminate debit memos," claimed Todd Dubner, Galileo vice president of product innovation, speaking today with Business Travel News. "We believe we have leap-frogged the competition here, but by no means do we assume they are sleeping."

"Carriers could not sustain creating fares for all of their agreements, then calculating discounts and filing them redundantly," said Randy Smith, Galileo senior director of product innovation. "In most cases, those fares are not filed. The agreements typically sit in faxed pieces of paper, or almost every GDS has built a first-generation product--ours is PrivateFares--which is like an electronic filing cabinet for agents to manually load these things in themselves."

GlobalFares also offers airlines, through Galileo, more flexibility in applying surcharges as well as the capability to assign fares based on whether or not tickets are issued electronically. Galileo benefits from "moving a significant chunk of our processing from our legacy system to a server environment," Smith said. GlobalFares will be expanded beyond North American travel in phases. Some customers began taking advantage of GlobalFares in December, and Galileo said it is nearing complete rollout of the product, which is free of charge.