This week's Update begins with an interesting story detailing how evolving consumer trends of the past few years (e.g., sustainability) are making their way into travel and online travel in particular. Enjoy.
Travelport Continues Improvements to Travelport Plus
("Travelport Launches Update to Unified Travelport Plus
Platform," January 19, 2022 via Business Travel
News)
Launched last year by Travelport as the ultimate successor to its
other global distributions system (GDS) platforms (Apollo, Galileo
and Worldspan), Travelport Plus continues to improve. Last week,
Travelport launched its latest iteration of the platform, an
iteration that leverages the platform's growing access to NDC
(New Distribution Capability) content from many of the major
airlines and improved connectivity with Hilton as well as adding
its new traveler facing portal, Trip Manager.
Speaking of Travelport, Hawaiian Airlines Elects To Go a Different Direction
("Hawaiian Airlines Surprises With Breakaway
Distribution Strategy," January 18, 2022 via Skift)
(subscription may be required)
In a surprise move, Hawaiian Airlines has elected to join many of
its European counterparts in discouraging (penalizing) agents'
use of legacy GDS platforms, including Travelport. According to its
announcement last week, beginning April 1, Hawaiian Airlines will
no longer display fares for travel within the Hawaiian Islands on
the legacy platforms and will assess a surcharge on all other
bookings made through the platforms. In an effort to convince
agents to support the move away from the legacy platforms, Hawaiian
Airlines is offering its historically web-only discounted fares to
agents who use Hawaiian Airlines' API, extranet portal or other
approved aggregators. With this change, Hawaiian Airlines intends
to implement dynamic pricing on its premium class seats while
offering travelers new ancillary products and loyalty benefits. It
will be interesting to watch whether this dramatic shift by the
largely leisure airline leads other more traditional airlines to
make similar changes. More to come.
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