As new industry changes come into play such as IATA’s NDC, our anonymous travel buyer feels GDSs must up their game or get left behind.
The world is constantly changing, and travel is becoming more complex with different rate types, policies, content, data capture, billing mechanisms, buying power – all the things that form part of the usual corporate travel programme. And GDSs are still a valuable tool in managing these challenges.
But with the new IATA NDC standards and the ease of XML integrations into work flows, GDSs face potential new competition, and I fear they are in danger of being left behind unless they open up a greater dialogue with their corporate partners: the corporate buyer and the TMC.
All too often it feels like they don’t truly understand the needs of their customers, so their practices can feel frustrating, inflexible and out of touch.
Here are some examples of where I see disparity between what we need and what is currently available to us:
- Hotel content continues to be a challenge, especially with smaller, non-chain properties or those who don’t see an economic benefit in working with a GDS. We have worked with our TMC to find a solution to this, but still have to put the booking information through the GDS in order to be able to provide the traveller with a full itinerary, and also for traveller tracking purposes and emergency/out of hours support. The GDS isn’t providing the content we want but we must then pay to bring the data back into the GDS where we need it.
- We must have price parity – and make sure those airline promises about ensuring they will never be cheaper on their website are policed and maintained. Fare differentials undermine confidence in a programme, and it’s imperative that those airlines are brought to task when this happens through their contracts with the GDS. As buyers, we need to have the confidence we will not continually be bombarded with the usual cry; “I can find it cheaper on the net”.
- And we also have challenges around our data as GDSs map everything to airports. So to look at room nights in areas outside London, I may have to run reports for Gatwick, Heathrow or Southampton, depending on how the hotel has loaded its rates. This means a lot of extra work to get in a good place to negotiate our hotel programme. GDSs need to look at this as a matter of urgency and work with hotels to ensure consistency in the loading of data. Perhaps we could also look to moving away from tying hotels to airports?
- We are perhaps in the minority in having a dedicated IATA number rather than using our TMC’s, and this has raised some concerns with regard to our booking data. I found out that it is industry practice for GDSs to sell this data, admittedly without personal information attached. But it still means that other people can see what we as a company have spent at specific hotels. When the matter was raised with our GDS I found that there was no opt-out option on the selling of the data – although surprisingly you can opt out when it comes to flight data.
GDSs must stay ahead of the game and they will only do this by truly understanding the needs of the corporate and the TMC. I would encourage them to enter into a dialogue with corporate and TMCs to create a more customer focused, flexible offering that truly delivers in this fast-changing environment.