GDS and travel IT company Amadeus is launching a new tool for agents to load fares which it says will lead to significant savings.
The FareXpert Filing platform will be launched next month, Stephane Durand, Amadeus's managing director for the UK, said.
He said it was for agents to load CAT 35, negotiated fares and discount fares – not published fares.
"We have designed a new fare filing system which agents can do themselves or outsource but it provides them with a brand new set of solutions to load and update fares.
"This is a big deal for travel agents as most of them invest a lot of resources to have their fares loaded. This will bring them both efficiency and expertise," he said.
He said the new the platform would be significantly more accurate, reduce the number of agency debit memos (ADMs) and allow agents to be more pro-active in managing their fares.
He said that agencies might previously have employed 15 staff to load and update fares but this could now be done with five staff, leading to significant savings.
Elaine Seeto, Amadeus's UK director of marketing, said that business travel agencies spent up to £4.40 (19%) of their costs for each ticket on invoicing, collection and payment preparation, according to research conducted for the GDS earlier this year. But they make just £1.90 on an average ticket price of £329.
"This is a significant cost and their margins are so minimal so anything that we can do to reduce costs and increase efficiency is a bonus for the agencies," she said.
Amadeus also announced it was building a new hotel distribution platform to provide a similar service for hotels which its Altea system does for airlines like BA.
Mr Durand said a large development team was now working on the two year project which when built would allow hoteliers to distribute through one channel in a single place.
He said that many hotels were using CRS system that were 20-25years old and which now had a high maintenance cost.
"There is a need now for the next generation technology to help hotels," he said.
The single image repository the new system would create would cut out a lot of the middlemen between the customer and the customer, Mr Durand said.
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