Galileo's Gordon Wilson, speaking at the annual conference of the UK and Ireland Institute of Travel Management in May, made an incisive presentation on how practices in leisure travel were heavily impacting on business travel.
Mr Wilson, now the GDS''s president and ceo, said that the vast leisure market drove change in the corporate market.
The obvious example is the low cost carriers (LCCs) which had "forced all the traditional airlines to adjust their fares, to simplify their fares and to streamline their booking processes," he said.
One result of these changes in traditional airlines' fare structures is the introduction of single tickets on short haul routes. There are now more single tickets being issued by agents than at any other time. The great benefit to travellers is that single tickets give them far more flexibility and choice.
While changes in the rules of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in the last 18 months have given agents more flexibility in issuing tickets, industry stalwarts like Mike Platt, HRG's industry affairs director and Brian Donnelly, regional director EMEA for FCm Travel Solutions, both said LCCs were the main reason for the introduction of single tickets.
Mr Donnelly added: "The low cost carriers have educated the market, making the travellers aware."
Mt Platt said that the effect of single tickets was that a traveller could go to Europe on one ticket and come back on another one.
"In the past you could only go there and back on one ticket. Now you can take the cheapest one way and then come back also on the cheapest – all on one ticket," he said.
But he said these tickets could be restricted. In some cases if people wanted or had to change, they would not get a re-fund on their original ticket.
This, he said, led people to buying two tickets but then their companies faced the likelihood of having to pay two transaction fees, one for each ticket. "There is an air of complexity about it all," Mr Platt said.
But at the same time, there were more opportunities for companies to make savings.
The benefits also fall to the traveller. Mr Donnelly said single fares allowed travellers to go out on one airline and come back on another or go out from one airport and come back to another.
"You might go out on Ryanair or easyJet but coming back late at night, you might be a better deal with BA," he said.
There is also the opportunity to go out on one class and come back in another, something which SAS has been successfully offering its business travellers for more than a year now.
Some FCm clients, he said, were now going out by plane to Brussels or Paris and coming back on a “more leisurely journey” on Eurostar.
There also growing examples of clients flying to Paris, taking the Thalys train (the high speed network serving Paris, Brussels, Cologne and Amsterdam) to Brussels and then flying or taking the Eurostar back to London.
It meant that what might have been two trips in the past was now being cut down to one, Mr Donnelly said.
"These tickets have opened up a lot more flexibility. People would have looked at such journeys in the past and seen them as confusing and complex. But you are now getting much more flexibility over both two and three sectors," he said.
There was another factor also at play, the extra security checks at airports which might make it difficult to day Pairs in one day, he said. Here again, the plane out and the train back could solve this situation.
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