Galileo Speeds Fare Filing

Galileo International last week announced it won the race to take advantage of new fare filing capabilities offered by the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. and now can display fares for North American travel within minutes, rather than hours, after ATPCO issues them, which Galileo said happens three times a day. ATPCO is the organization to which airlines file fares and from which global distribution systems get them.

"This is a very good deal for us," said Jeff Kurn, global strategic sourcing manager for Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., whose agents use Galileo. "We now see more accurate—though not necessarily cheaper—fares. It also lets travelers using our self-booking system price more complicated itineraries."

Galileo's GlobalFares system also automates the application of corporate volume agreements, officials said. Galileo and other GDSs have been working to use new fare categories offered 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).

"In most cases, those fares are not filed," said Randy Smith, Galileo senior director of product innovation. "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."

From the buyer perspective, the manual application of discounts can be difficult to guarantee and often contain errors. "This should nearly eliminate debit memos," claimed Todd Dubner, Galileo vice president of product innovation. "We believe we have leap-frogged the competition here, but by no means do we assume they are sleeping."

Competitors quickly pointed out certain areas in which they still claim an advantage over Galileo, but none could dispute that the Parsippany, N.J.-based GDS now can turn ATPCO fares around more quickly than its competitors.

Even Worldspan part-owner Northwest lent its support to Galileo's move. Vice president of distribution planning Al Lenza was quoted in Galileo's announcement as saying, "Galileo's next- generation GlobalFares reduces fare discrepancies and improves the speed of loading our fare information in Galileo via an automated method."

Other GDSs argued that they already have some of the automation in place, particularly in terms of having an automated system for applying fare rules, an essential component.

"Speed to market with fares is a very important issue, but the driver in distributing fares is not the numeric value," said Mike Parks, Worldspan senior vice president and general manager of worldwide travel distribution, who, like Worldspan president and CEO Paul Blackney, formerly served as a Galileo executive. "What takes time is the rules associated with the fare. Most GDSs need to translate the rules, often manually, into 'GDSese,' requiring a large number of fare interpreters. We don't have that department full of people reading off one screen and translating into another, so it's far more significant to have 100 percent automated rules."

Galileo's Smith shot back: "Mike doesn't get it. Not only are we taking automated rules, but we're taking more than he is now."

According to Bob Lowry, Amadeus North America vice president of customer support and product management, not all agencies will want to take advantage of the new system for negotiated rates. "Some will be fine with this and say, 'no problem,' but for others who take the fares and work out contracts that they file in their databases and in the GDSs' private databases, the desire to keep that truly private will make it hard for them to let go. We'll see how airlines and agencies deal with it."

Amadeus today moves fares into an upload schedule 30 minutes after it gets them from ATPCO, lagging behind Galileo's new automatic update. But Lowry was skeptical that the delay will prove a major competitive advantage for Galileo—particularly since all other GDSs already are working to match.

"People do those comparisons today about what fares are where and when," he said. "So much depends on the timing of the loads, and at any given time, you can test and see a discrepancy in one hour but in another hour we're all the same. Even still, having access to fares first doesn't necessarily work in the buyer's favor. Fares can go up as well as they can go down."

A Sabre spokesperson said the GDS soon will offer better low-fare searching than does Galileo.

"This is like a marathon, there's a pack and we're all running at about the same pace," said Galileo's Smith. "We just leap-frogged them and now we get to talk about it. We know they're all working really hard and they'll announce something in the next year or two."