Travelport GDS this week enabled U.K.-based subscribers to pre-pay for British Airways seat assignments, though no incentive or commission structure for agents has been determined. Travelport is facilitating the sale of seat assignments--previously only available through ba.com--using its Options Integrator, which "links directly to BA's pre-paid seating content" and is supported by technology from BookingBuilder.
Travelport plans to use Options Integrator to sell other ancillary services from other airlines. Next up: upselling for United Airlines' Economy Plus seats, expected to begin later this month. ( Sabre already offers the Economy Plus upsell).
Somewhat complicating the selling of BA's seat assignments, the carrier only charges the fee to some passengers. Though BA offers free seat selection to all customers at the time of check-in, many economy passengers must pay an additional fee to secure seats at booking. Some elite loyalty program members, however, are exempt, and travel management company sources indicated that preferred partners also can be exempted.
Apart from Spirit Airlines, U.S. carriers generally do not charge passengers to select general seating at the time of booking, though fees to book exit row or bulkhead seats abound. TMC sources told The Beatthat BA's close partner, American Airlines, as recently as December was planning to institute a seat selection fee by spring 2011. An AA spokesperson would not "comment on rumors or speculation," but added that the carrier is "constantly evaluating products and services for our customers."
Travelport's commitment to sell BA seat assignments dates back to a full-content agreement they announced in late 2009, which is set for expiration in April 2013.
While the prospect of enabling ancillary sales in travel agency channel has been tied to the opportunity for agencies to earn commissions or incentive revenue on those sales, the BA-Travelport program does not now contemplate such a benefit. "There is a case to be made to do that in the future, but these are early days," said Travelport GDS portfolio director and head of regional product management Reg Warlop. "What we're trying to do today is enable the agents to do the booking without impacting their workflows, their productivity."
There may be other extras planned for the future which are better candidates for agency incentives than something like seat selection which previously was included in the fare and which travelers' may need little incentive to buy.
Warlop characterized the Travelport Options Integrator as a workaround to enable agents who use legacy desktops to sell such optional services as the BA seat assignment or United's Economy Plus.
Regarding the BA seat assignment, "Since the majority of our agents are still using the Galileo desktop, we had to find a simple mechanism that would trigger an alert, because it's a very small percentage of bookings that are eligible for this kind of ancillary service offer," Warlop said. "It would be impossible for an agent to have to look for them. That's why we decided that we'd absolutely need listing to make it completely easy. BookingBuilder has this listing technology that we have already in our portfolio. We already licensed for it, so we might as well just use this piece of it."
According to BookingBuilder CEO Seth Perelman, "In this particular case, we created a whole custom plug-in for BookingBuilder Genie that understands when the agent hits certain points in booking British Airways within Apollo, Galileo and Worldspan. That acts as a bridge between the user and a Travelport server, which in turn connects to BA and facilitates the purchasing of the additional content. In this case, it's seat assignments, and, based on frequent flyer status, the agent may purchase those seats or they may be free."
Though Options Integrator works with legacy agency desktops, it requires a download by subscribers--either desktop-by-desktop or site-wide, depending on the TMC's IT configuration, said Travelport GDS senior product manager of merchandizing Steven Ratcliffe.
Right now, ancillary airline content flowing through the Options Integrator is limited to the BA initiative, but Ratcliffe noted, "We do intend to put more content through there. It will become a much more useful tool with more content as we go forward." Perelman said Options Integrator was designed to "facilitate all types of additional content that they want to offer with minimal to zero additional programming required."
Warlop added that connectivity established with BA to sell seat assignments also would be enabled through the Universal API, which Travelport launched last year to aggregate content from multiple sources, including supplier direct connects. However, most Travelport subscribers likely would not adopt the Universal API until Travelport launches the Universal Desktop in the first half of this year.
"With the view of a longer-term strategy of content coming into our GDS and being able to be consumed by any point of sale--including legacy desktops, universal desktops, the Universal API and then to the Expedias of the world, et cetera--this is really what we've done with this implementation," Warlop said of Travelport's work with BA. "So, it's not only a front-end widget that we've built. The majority of the work, with a long-term view on a BA relationship, is to pipe BA ancillary services into the GDS."
~ Jay Campbell contributed to this report.
This article originally was published in The Beat