Budapest
- The International Air Transport Association expects that newly announced
cooperation with the Global Business Travel Association will ease travel buyer
concerns about data privacy issues related to certain products.
Speaking here last week during
a GBTA Europe conference, IATA senior vice president of industry distribution
and financial services Aleksander Popovich said the cooperation on a forthcoming
GBTA report about corporate travel data and a Nov. 13 webinar demonstrating IATA's
DDS marketing intelligence data product primarily for airlines—the new
incarnation of its PaxIS product—is designed to remove any concerns buyers have
about the level of data reported through the product.
"Rather than simply
answering the next question that comes along, we want to be much more proactive
than that and show the whole thing, then get feedback," Popovich said.
Data privacy as it
relates to IATA's activities for years has been a point of contention for
buyers. Recently, concerns arose when buyers discovered that a Spanish company,
Accelya, was selling to airlines through its eSmash product very detailed corporate travel data, including one corporate buyer's number of tickets and
fares per route. While eSmash is not an IATA product, Accelya is one of IATA's largest
data processing centers.
Priska Schmidli, global
head of travel and event sourcing for UBS, said such instances show that
buyers' data concerns are twofold. "We don't know what kind of data they
have, and we don't know how it's stored, what kind of security measures they
have or how it's distributed," she said. "People prefer the best
network, and that can only be established by the data if they know where people
are traveling to, but on the corporate side, we do not want our data
shared."
On eSmash, Popovich said
that he clearly informed Accelya that such data belonged neither to it nor
IATA, and, to his knowledge, "they are taking action on this."
He added that data
suppliers in general should become more open with corporate buyers in showing
their products and demonstrating exactly how and what data are used in them.
"I told Accelya, 'Don't
convince me. Convince the customer,' " Popovich said. " 'Convince the
UBSs and the travel management companies of the world, and show them as we've
been trying to do with our products.' "
Though she said she
remains concerned about other data vendors like eSmash, Schmidli said a recent
presentation for her company by IATA eased some. "We went through different
search criteria to see whether our name, UBS, showed up, and I have security
that within the IATA product this is not the case," she said. "Because
IATA before was not even in discussions or talking with the customers or
corporates, that's something we see as a great step forward."
In the meantime,
Schmidli suggested buyers do what they can to protect their own data. UBS, for
example, contracted directly with two global distribution systems that signed
data protection confidentiality agreements ensuring UBS data won't be shared.