Airline distribution costs are likely to go down by up to 4% in the next five years, Welmer Blom, vp sales and services for KLM, said.
Currently they make up 11% of a carrier's operating costs but this will go down to 9% or 7%, Mr Blom said.
He was speaking in a debate on distribution costs at the ACTE Executive Forum in Amsterdam.
One area of distribution costs which was rising were the credit card costs which Mr Blom said were "going up year by year."
He urged travel management companies to make more bookings via the internet rather than go through an agent.
But Luc Pannecoeck, general manager for Amadeus in the Benelux countries, said the internet was not the solution to cutting distribution costs.
"There needs to be IT and people," he said. "For example what does it cost for an airline to build a database of fares and what is the cost of the alternative?
"Unless we have a database, we do not see a reduction in costs. We need technology to drive down these costs."
But travel managers said the most important aspect of distribution costs was their transparency. Corrado Simontacchi, purchasing manager goods and services EMEA and APAC for Huntsman, said: "We don't need to know how the systems work. We just need to know how much it costs. We need transparency."
Earlier Mr Simontacchi, in his presentation on distribution costs, said GDS costs for major European airlines were $7-$10 per ticket while merchant fees charged by credit card companies were between 2.1% and 2.8%. This was around $12-$15 on a $500 ticket.
He said some carriers were now focusing on merchant fees rather than GDS fees with some “willing to market cheaper payment solutions.”
He added that airline affinity cards and the sale of air miles to credit card companies were now “major revenue and profit centres for airlines.”
Mr Simontacchi said the current situation was "unfavourable" to the buyers because of the lack of transparency.
Corporates were also concerned that costs were being passed onto them rather than being taken out of the system.
But because of the increased number of distribution channels, corporates also had to work out the true cost of booking.
He said the increased number of channels with content spread through them also did not help a corporate assess the financial benefits of their travel management programme.