Claiming an industry first, Northwest Airlines last month enabled electronic-ticketed passengers to change reservations and exchange e-tickets on its Web site, regardless of where the original reservation was made. Northwest developed the new services with help from self-service kiosk provider Kinetics and Worldspan, which is planning similar services for Orbitz and its own Trip Manager corporate booking tool.
Such features also are in the works at Sabre and its GetThere subsidiary.
Traditionally among the most manually intensive, costly and error-prone services in travel management, changes and exchanges until now were handled exclusively by travel professionals. Worldspan brought its Automated Reissues functionality to a number of carriers nearly two years ago, followed by airline-specific offerings for its GDS-based agencies. As more travelers make their own reservations, however, the natural next step is enabling them to handle the post-reservation process as well.
"People going to Web sites, whether a corporate booking tool or nwa.com, are self-service people," said Sue Powers, Worldspan senior vice president of worldwide product solutions. "Traditionally, if travel plans change and people want to make changes, they go into a manually intensive process that doesn't meet their self-service needs." Powers noted that although it remains in limited use, such technology promises to reduce service fees and maximize spending on change penalties. The reissues functionality also helps airlines collect those fees and enforce ticketing policies.
During its first week in use, the nwa.com product handled nearly 1,000 transactions and collected nearly $100,000 in change fees—85 percent of which came from transactions originated by an agency. "That money never was appropriately processed," said Al Lenza, Northwest vice president of distribution and e-commerce. "We would not have collected the majority of it."
Mat Orrego, president of Bloomington, Ind.-based Cornerstone Information Systems, expected the "pretty significant" advancement to reduce debit memos generated to collect change fees that go unreported by agencies. Powers said it also may prevent some travelers from being stopped at the airport with a mistakenly reconstructed ticket.
While the Northwest product seeks to preserve the airline's pool of change fee revenues, buyers need to beware of a different kind of leakage, in which travelers could use the service to evade policy controls. The issue for managed travel is that nwa.com cannot, for example, prevent travelers from exchanging for first-class tickets against policy. Currently, only Worldspan agencies can view Web-based changes made by their traveler clients.
Some of the issues surrounding the exchange process parallel those that plague the usage and tracking of unused tickets, particularly electronic ones. For example, "What prevents a corporate traveler from using the new itinerary for leisure travel?" asked David Wood, president and CEO of Barrington, Ill.-based Trondent Development Corp.
"That is the danger," agreed Mark Johnson, vice president with WorldTravel BTI's Corporate Fulfillment Services division. "It's new enough that we'll have to see what happens, but travel managers are interested in the effective use of the dollar, and going outside of policy will almost certainly be a concern."
Johnson said "virtually everyone" is working on automating changes and exchanges. He believes that for corporate travel, the function belongs with fulfillment centers, not on airline Web sites.
To back its product, Worldspan is using a 13-month-old online ticket database. Johnson said agencies and other parties also are creating databases, "at least to not have to pull tickets out of a drawer." For distributors, he said, the toughest issue is matching the original Airlines Reporting Corp. transaction. "You can't just issue the new ticket," he said. "You have to reference the original. Automating the exchange is not the difficult part, it's about managing that database and keeping it updated in real time." Wood also pointed to ARC-related issues as a stumbling block for distributors, noting that "other countries allow electronic submissions through the GDS to handle refunds."
"What Northwest has done is a huge advancement," said Bill Spilman, former head of distribution with America West Airlines and now director of marketing and portfolio management for the transportation division of Plano, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems. "People have been talking about it for years," he said. "If the ticket is fully refundable, it's easy; if it's not, you have to read the rules electronically to determine what the passenger can do with the ticket."
Worldspan plans to build ticket cancellation and exchange capabilities into both Orbitz and its Trip Manager tool by the end of this quarter. "The biggest challenge is to be sure the re-planned trip meets corporate policy," Powers said. "We also hear from corporations that this reissue process needs to manage unused tickets and unused portions of tickets."
"Looking at historical fares and changing, canceling or refunding them is under development as part of our new DirectFares engine," said GetThere vice president of product marketing Mark Orttung. "It will be a key feature, and we've gotten strong feedback from customers about it. We're aiming for the first part of next year with it. The hardest part is recalculating the fare. Once you develop the database of historical fares, from that point it's pretty straightforward."