<B> Zoning In On Groups</B>
<I>U.S. Carriers Debut Air Programs For '99</I>
By Chris Davis
Coming off a year of record load factors and revenues, the airline industry has little motivation to offer heavy discounts to meeting buyers in 1999. But that's not to say that there are not pockets of opportunity where the interests of corporate planners and airline suppliers meet, both on earth and in cyberspace.
With the Asian market in disarray, American, Continental and Northwest all are planning to expand their zone fare programs in the coming months to include the Pacific Rim. "This will round out all of our markets," said George Coyle, American Airlines' product manager for group and meeting travel. "It will enable people to get a discount through zone fares anywhere American flies."
Continental Airlines will offer more group discounts on a route-by-route basis, particularly on international flights. "Flights are fuller than they used to be, so we have a challenge to offer the same kind of discounts that we can offer when there are empty seats," said Brenda Davis, manager of group and incentive sales development for North America. "So we'll look to tactical sales in markets where planes are not as full as we'd like them to be, and we may sell those routes more aggressively."
Continental also plans to streamline its zone-fare program. "We're going to simplify the process, since customer feedback has indicated it could be a little bit easier to deal with administratively," Davis said. "We're going to make all zone fares bi-directional--the same price flying from zone A to zone B as from zone B to zone A."
Davis mentioned Dusseldorf, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo and Zurich as potential destinations for specific-route discounts, as well as "specific domestic city pairs that change from month to month."
Northwest also said it plans to expand its program to the Pacific region.
For all three airlines, final dates and prices haven't been firmly established, but all should be available in the next few months.
United plans to introduce two new international meeting programs by summer--one specifically for United, one for the full Star Alliance.
Another focus for 1999 is the online arena, where many airline officials said they hope to allow meeting attendees to book airline tickets at negotiated group rates. No airline Website offers this functionality yet.
"Hotels are doing it now, but the airline reservation setup is a little more complex," said Bellingham, Wash.-based consultant Corbin Ball. "All the airlines are developing it and encouraging e-ticketing, so this is the logical next step. Web years are like dog years, they go so fast. I expect to see very quick changes."
Gail Bill, Northwest Airlines' senior manager of meeting and incentives sales, said the ability to book meeting reservations online "is going to happen sometime this year." And Coyle at American agreed that "it's something we've wanted to bring on. The booking capability is there; we just need to enhance it to include discounted rates. We should be able to move on that rapidly."
But the traditional stumbling block of meeting rates--the fraudulent use of discounted fares by people not headed for the meeting at all--remains a large stumbling block.
"The issue that we all face is if we're offering discounts to a specific group, how do we put a fence around it to make sure only those people going to that meeting with that group are getting the discount?" said JoAnn Bedrosian Ryan, national manager of association sales for United Airlines. "How do I stop every Tom, Dick and Harry who happens to be traveling to that particular city during that particular week from going in and taking that discount? That's what we're all struggling with."
One solution would be to require a code to access and trigger the discount. "There's a file number they'll have to know to get the discount," Bill said, "and the only way they'll know the number is if they get it from their meeting planner. The code will automatically price the fare at the group-discounted level."
Once the airlines' network infrastructures are upgraded to handle the group and meeting discounts, there will be several applications for attendees to use. "We're looking for the ability for an attendee to go to the Website of a meeting or convention and be able to hotlink directly into Continental's Website to book the fare," said Davis. "It's the main goal of the Website."
Ryan envisioned a scenario where attendees could book group-discounted airfares and hotel rooms at the same time. "That would be my dream," she said. "I would like to get on board with the housing people and make it one-stop shopping, if it's possible. That would make life for the planner so simple."
Also new from Delta for 1999 is the ability for planners to electronically submit group proposals, with a sales representative e-mailing an offer within 24 hours--a functionality Continental, Northwest and US Airways already offer.
Bob McNally, Delta's system manager of meeting, incentive and group sales, touted the functionality as a time-saver for planners, but others said they have not yet seen much interest in it. "We've had it for more than a year, and the response is very small yet," Bill said. "It's going to get bigger, but right now it's just not there. People still rely on the phone."
Coyle said American likely will add a similar functionality to its site soon, but United has no plans to do so, Ryan said.
"It's not really an efficient way to communicate at this point," according to Ryan, "since I can't imagine traffic is so high that it's somebody's full-time job to handle e-mailed requests. So I don't know if the response time on that is so quick. If I hear that it's great and everyone loves it--and I haven't heard anything like that--it's a fairly easy thing to put in. But I haven't jumped on that bandwagon yet.