<B> Majors Eye E-Tix Fix</B>
<I>AA, UA Join Forces, Continental Races To Forge Interlining Capabilities</I>
By Jay Campbell
American and United Airlines last week announced they are working together on electronic ticket interlining and will make it an option for travelers wherever e-ticketing is available by the summer of 1999. They pledged to follow that by expanding interlining capabilities to travel agencies.
Meanwhile, Continental Airlines claimed it will beat both American and United to the punch with a rollout of its own e-ticket interlining service with domestic alliance partner America West by early 1999, also with a later agency rollout.
While the fact that airlines are actively pursuing interlining is welcome news for corporate travel managers, many said they had hoped--and believed--that the feature would be available sooner.
The lack of interlining has been a major roadblock in business travelers' acceptance of e-tickets as the norm. On trips in which travelers want to use e-tickets with more than one airline, the travel agent currently must issue one ticket for each airline. Also, in the event of a cancellation or other unexpected schedule change, travelers holding e-tickets must get in line and have the airline they originally intended to fly print out a paper ticket. Travelers then bring the paper ticket to the new airline.
The latter point is less of an issue for corporate travel departments than the first one, said Cindy Morse, corporate travel manager for Penzoil in Houston. "In that case, even with a paper ticket, you still have to get it validated," she said. "But being able to put more than one carrier on the same e-ticket is a very important point for us. The way it is now is pretty time-consuming for our reporting purposes."
Morse said that while it takes about two minutes to drive a normal ticket, it can take 5 to 10 minutes for an agent to run several e-tickets in one PNR.
Jack Reynaert Jr. agreed. "This affects the agents' productivity," said the travel manager for Troy, Mich.-based Kelley Services. "If you're out on United and back on Northwest on an e-ticket, you have to drive two tickets. Our travel agents are complaining all the time about the extra work. To me, it's critical that we keep our agents as efficient as possibly, especially in light of the commission cuts."
<B>Interlining: Later Than Expected</B>
In the current fee-based environment, Reynaert said, the company must pay extra fees to the agency when such a situation occurs. He estimated that his travelers use multiple airlines on about 10-15 percent of trips, or a total of about 80 a month. "If each of those takes the agents 10 minutes longer, that's 200 minutes a week. I'd rather have them using that time to look for low fares or some other service that adds value."
Despite the interlining stumbling block, both Kelley Services and Penzoil are heavily promoting e-ticketing. Reynaert said over 90 percent of his tickets are electronic since he incentivized the agency to issue them--and after Northwest gave travelers bonus miles for using them.
At Penzoil, about 75 percent of domestic reservations are electronic--"but I'd say the lack of interlining is preventing about 10 or 15 percent more people from using them," Morse said. "You'd think this would have come quicker. Maybe each airline sees no advantage in giving people the ability to use other airlines."
In fact, interlining originally had been expected to arrive by the end of 1998 (<I>BTN</I>, March 16). And it still could happen sooner than the summer of 1999. Said Sue Fullman, United's director of distribution planning, "Summer 1999 is our most pragmatic and realistic estimate. That's earlier than I thought it would be two years ago, and later than I thought it would be a year ago."
Continental staff vice president of distribution planning Steve Cossette said he was "a little disappointed about mid-1999, but I think it's inevitable. It's a very large project in terms of labor. The skill set required is highly specialized and you can't work on too many things at the same time."
A key issue when it comes to interlining is that it requires the airlines to have the same standards for all of their internal accounting, customer service and reservations systems. Carriers are building on the standards established by the Air Transport Association and the International Air Transport Association (<I>BTN</I>, Oct. 28, 1996).
"Most of the standard is written, based on what ATA and IATA have done," said Cossette. "But I'd say about 20 percent of the work is fine detail that those organizations couldn't address with a global standard for all carriers."
Cossette said other, more general, issues at airlines--such as global alliances--these days are pushing some things to the back burner.
When implemented, interlining on American and United will be an option in all areas where e-ticketing is available, which is throughout North America and on some international routes. The two carriers said they are particularly good candidates for interlining, not only because they are the world's two largest airlines, but also because they share a hub at Chicago O'Hare, a place that has a lot of delays and a lot of interlining. The carriers, however, are as yet unsure of whether the interlining service will require any testing with travelers, according to an American spokesman.