Farelogix, Airlines Developing Ancillary Purchasing Reporting

Farelogix today announced plans to launch an airline records warehouse that holds data on ancillary and unbundled purchases made by travelers and can serve as a framework for airlines to provide expenditure reports for such services to travel management companies and corporations.

American Airlines and another U.S. legacy carrier have signed on to help develop the E-FLX Electronic Miscellaneous Document system, according to Farelogix CEO Jim Davidson. A miscellaneous document is a log created when a traveler makes a purchase or changes an existing airline ticket during the course of travel and then is linked with the corresponding passenger name record.

Accounting for airlines' new merchandizing efforts has been a thorn in the side of many travel managers as neither carriers nor airline IT providers have delivered a comprehensive plan to capture the data associated with purchases of unbundled services. Without the data, buyers have been playing a guessing game in figuring out expenditures for checked baggage, extra legroom and inflight meals. The lack of visibility also has prohibited buyers from negotiating these services as part of their airline contracts, instead relegating negotiating to frequent flyer status-matching.

In recent months, there have been several widescale initiatives by travel technology providers to help facilitate the selling and reporting of these fees, including new agent point-of-sale desktops, online booking tool user interfaces and GDS traveler profile systems.

Farelogix's E-FLX system is part of a multi-product strategy for enabling airline merchandizing. In January, the company went live with its new fare management FMS2 system, which builds custom fare structures and rules engines to market certain services to segmented traveler types and frequent flyer programs. According to Davidson, no carriers have signed on to use the system citing the lack of other component systems to track or sell these services at the time. This week, the company made available for download its new Web-based agent point-of-sale desktop tool, designed for booking the new unbundled airline services.

The initial release of the electronic miscellaneous document system will enable the connectivity and transfer of data within such current airline IT systems as departure control and revenue management. Davidson said future phases will enable the ability to transfer the data to ARC and other bank settlement plans to provide agencies with the information and in turn corporations. "There are the capabilities to create a lot of reports for corporations in terms of what they actually bought because everything is associated with the ticket," he said. "You can run a series of reports that can show a traveler bought a movie and a meal along with a ticket from Chicago to Denver."

At this week's National Business Travel Association Financial Forum in New York, Continental Airlines executive vice president of marketing Jim Compton pointed to work the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. is doing to facilitate reporting around ancillary and unbundled services. Much like the manual process of entering each company's negotiated airfares into different global distribution systems, Compton said, "To a certain extent some of the ancillary fares are in that same type of thing today. There are products that we are working specifically with in the distribution channels, but there is some real industry work that is coming that will allow that to be more robust and transparent."