Worldspan Third GDS To Display Total Car Rental Pricing

Worldspan last month introduced a new pricing feature—adopting what effectively has become the industry standard—for posting the complete price of a car rental, including taxes and surcharges, on the initial screen of the global distribution system.

Both the base rate and the total price—guaranteed to be within 1 percent of the actual price—appear on a single screen in Worldspan's Car Source Complete Pricing. To be included, car rental firms have to participate in Car Source, the highest level of connectivity, which provides a seamless link between their internal reservation system and the GDS.

Of Worldspan's 35 car rental suppliers, Ace, Advantage, Avis, Dollar, Enterprise, Thrifty and Payless all offer complete pricing, and Hertz just recently upgraded to Car Source. Tom Werthington, Worldspan director of travel supplier solutions, said the GDS soon planned to sign up two more brands, at which point 98 percent of its car rental bookings will provide complete pricing information.

The feature applies to corporate rates loaded in the GDS as well. Through the Car Source link, each car rental company will provide the complete price from its own inventory, so the information would be available when a corporate discount number is input in the corporate rate display.

Worldspan is the third GDS to offer "total pricing" of car rentals at the shopping stage. The feature initially was introduced by Sabre in February 2002, followed by Amadeus last June. Eleven car rental firms—Ace, Advantage, Alamo, Avis, Budget, Dollar, Enterprise, Hertz, National, Payless and Thrifty—participate in Sabre's total pricing feature. Avis, Europcar and Sixt participate in Amadeus' Complete Access Plus—seamless connectivity with total price of the rental—with Advantage, Alamo, Enterprise, Hertz, National and Thrifty expected to sign on by year-end, said Amadeus spokesperson Debra Iannaci.

Sandra Ries, Galileo director of leisure distribution for car, said the GDS is developing total pricing capability but couldn't pin down when the feature would be available. Currently, Galileo users can find out the total price of the car in the single company availability display, although only Hertz, Alamo and Enterprise will return the estimated total price of the car in this format.

To participate in seamless connectivity with the GDSs requires an investment in the "hundreds of millions of dollars," in part because GDS programming configurations are different, said Stewart Brown, vice president of revenue management at Dollar. In some cases, total pricing may not be universal. National and Alamo offer total pricing only for rentals in North America and a handful of international destinations, according to Kellie Smythe, vice president of e-business at ANC Rental Corp.

Spurring the advent of the total pricing feature is the growing dominance of the consumer-oriented online booking sites. "This fits within our entire strategy to broaden our scope to provide data for consumers, rather than just travel agents," Werthington said.

Henry Harteveldt, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said car rentals comprise only 35 percent of all travel bookings on the Web. However, the amount of revenue from online bookings of cars continues to grow, from $2 billion in 2001 to an estimated $2.3 billion in 2003, with the amount expected to reach $2.7 billion in 2004.

Travelocity last month became the first online booking site to require all of its car suppliers to offer total pricing. The company also reduced the dozens of car suppliers on the site—those listed in Sabre, which serves as Travelocity's database—to just 11, each of which pays a fee. Expedia long has offered "premium" positioning on its site to car rental partners, which pay a fee for the privilege plus commission.

Both Expedia and Orbitz, which use Worldspan as their database, have plans to develop total pricing, Werthington said. The self-booking tools don't yet offer total pricing, although Sabre's GetThere expects it to be available by year-end. For Amadeus' E-Travel tool, Hertz rates include taxes for direct link bookings.

Also driving total pricing, along with the need to inform customers of the complete price of a car at the initial shopping phase, is the wide discrepancy at many airports between the base rate of a car and the actual price. Taxes and extra fees have mushroomed so much that surcharges at some airports can increase car costs by 20 percent or more. The actual cost of a four-day rental of an economy car from Hertz at Dallas Fort Worth International, for example, was $198.31, compared with a base rate of $136. That disparity drew the National Association of Attorneys General a couple of years back to pressure the industry to develop total pricing.

For corporate travelers who book negotiated rates loaded into the GDS or self-booking tool, perhaps the primary value of total pricing on the GDS is that it's easier to find out the amount of extra surcharges and taxes added onto the rate. "From a corporate point of view, there's a need to confirm the integrity of the rate," said Bob Langsfeld, a partner at Incline Village, Nev.-based The Corporate Solutions Group. Showing the full cost "educates users to be sensitive to it."

Corporations traditionally negotiate the rate and special ancillary fees, such as city and midweek surcharges, but there is a trend toward getting a handle on the overall cost. Said a travel manager at one large East Coast corporation, "We try to negotiate the fees and show the total cost of a rental in the online booking tool."

Meanwhile, Sabre is working on a "geosearch" function so users can input an address and find the nearest car rental location with the lowest price. According to Bob Lewis, Sabre Cars key account director, this would let people easily compare rates from airport and non-airport locations.