A handful of corporate self-booking providers said tests on self-service online e-ticket exchanges would commence no later than early next year. Such features have had limited presence in the marketplace despite clear demand from corporate users who change roughly 15 percent to 20 percent of their ticketed itineraries.
Sabre's GetThere subsidiary said it would announce plans today to begin beta testing online refunds and exchanges in the first quarter of next year for "restricted or unrestricted tickets, on virtually any airline, for both domestic and international trips."
Worldspan, whose pioneering work on automated reissues and exchanges in the global distribution system recently helped enable both Northwest Airlines and Expedia
(BTN, Sept. 23) to offer the feature on their Web sites, said its Trip Manager corporate booking tool would be equipped similarly in the next two months, with international itineraries included next year.
Outtask said it would focus on such support during the first quarter of 2003, including a voice component. A spokesperson for Galileo said it Highwire division "considers it a priority." Amadeus and TRX have no related plans for their current products, respectively, E-Travel's Aergo and ResAssist. Orbitz is "still looking at" such a feature as part of a deal with Worldspan, which was set to begin last quarter and will terminate in April. The only corporate booking provider to have implemented such a feature is a unit of Minneapolis-based Navitaire, formerly known as Via World Network, which provided the tool to its parent company, Accenture.
Further detailing plans it first described in July when Northwest launched its capability
(BTN, July 15), GetThere said the process allows a traveler to request a refund or a change on an existing e-ticket booked on- or offline. If changing, the traveler can revise the booking or create a new one. The system then calculates and displays the total cost, including the change fee and fare differential. GetThere vice president of product marketing Mark Orttung called automated exchanges "a centerpiece of touchless fulfillment, providing cost savings for the company and a real win for the traveler. Giving them a sense that they can complete the process in one place, we think it will drive more bookings online."
Corporations typically pay their fulfillment provider an additional transaction fee for agent-assisted reissues and refunds, which a recent Institute of Business Travel Management study conducted by IBM Consulting found to be $32 on average. Such functions executed by travelers would generate a self-booking fee of no more than about $7.
GetThere is using its own faring engine technology in conjunction with a ticket database from parent Sabre. "You get the historical fare information to know what rules and value apply," Orttung said. "Then you effectively shop for a new itinerary, calculating the impact of change fees and new fares. It's one of our most requested enhancements."
"We've been asking for this since day one," said Jack Chu, project manager for travel systems at GetThere client ChevronTexaco in San Francisco, who said that about 15 percent of online bookings require changes. "It's something we hear from travelers loud and clear."
Travel Tech Consulting's Norm Rose called it "essential to drive adoption."
A Navitaire executive in July 2000 said automating Accenture's tickets that involved a refund or exchange cut fees on them to $8 from about $50. Navitaire's Via product, however, was not marketed successfully to other buyers.
One recent development that precipitated the demand for automated exchanges is the airlines' new policies on nonrefundables. "Because one of the new policies is that any changes to nonrefundables have to be made before the date of travel, people are showing a sense of urgency in response to that time limit," said Sue Powers, senior vice president of worldwide product solutions at Worldspan.
Outtask president and CEO Tom DePasquale agreed, saying the airlines' new limits on or, in some cases, elimination of the practice of waiving ticketing rules for top distributors also bumped up demand.
According to Kathy Emerick, national director of business development for TravelLeaders in Coral Gables, Fla., the airlines' new due date on the traveler's decision has resulted in a doubling of the rate of exchange for nonrefundable fares, for most clients. "This means more transaction fees, but less 'new' transactions with old money sitting in the airlines' bank accounts," she said. "This is good news to our clients, as even a $200 change fee is far better than losing the full value or sitting long term somewhere. Corporations' cash is flowing more efficiently this way. In effect, the airlines have forced corporations not to shy away from nonrefundables, but to manage them better."
Some travel agencies have attempted to automate at least parts of the refund and exchange process. Doing so can be risky though, because agencies receive debit memos from the carriers for not collecting change fees and because travelers sometimes are stopped at the airport if they don't pay such fees or if their ticket is not properly reconstructed.
"We're doing simple exchanges automatically, those with the same class of service on the same carrier," said Kelly Carney, CIO at World Wide Travel Service in Little Rock, Ark. "But we still review it. To stop having to review our exchanges is on the top of our list. I'd also like to take it to the next level on mixed classes of service and multiple airlines, but for that you need a rules database."
Powers last week said Worldspan's Rapid Reprice reissues functionality collected $441 million in exchange fees for air carriers on 2.4 million transactions during the first 10 months of 2002. Though such collections are "not always the most popular thing" for buyers, she said, "they're better off knowing because carriers are now serious about enforcing the rules at the airport."