Ai Editorial: Airline offers and shopping, what’s there for shoppers?

11th February, 2020

Ai Editorial: It is imperative for airlines to assess how travel shoppers perceive the overall value while shopping via the indirect channel. This would improve once intermediaries and technology specialists respond to the call for better presentation and UX design for discovering airline offerings, writes Ai’s Ritesh Gupta  

 

Airlines are looking at investing and structuring their teams around several areas – product management, customer data platform, data analytics, IT set up etc. to serve the customer throughout their journey.

The entire plan around modern retailing starts from understanding what the travel shopper is looking for, and then working out an itinerary. An offer could include only a flight ticket (along with air ancillaries, bundled or unbundled) plus other products (travel-related ancillaries and even other products, again bundled or unbundled).

An integral part of airline retailing is enabling the shopper, be it one from the leisure segment or the corporate traveler, to view the complete offer. From distribution perspective, NDC is a messaging standard. It isn’t an answer to the entire organizational investment to support their retailing plan.

In the distribution world, the complexity primarily comes from the fact that in the indirect channel, the industry is attempting to utilize systems, fare filing etc. not designed to manage product bundles or ancillaries in general. What airlines have been finding attractive with NDC is doing away with filing of fares, and all priced offers to be created by the airline’s Offer Management System.

Just not about crafting the offer

Airlines assert that they can manage the offer on their own channels, but presenting flight-related options or offers to customers booking elsewhere tends to be a challenge.

For their distribution mix, other than the commercial aspect, airlines are looking at how their third party distribution partners are gearing up to enable the shopper to choose the offer that is right for them. 

The likes of Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport acknowledge that with options such as branded fares, a la carte ancillaries, bundling, plus dynamic NDC offers, travel technology and distribution entities have to prepare for  - how to present the assorted offers in a simple and comparable way. The airline might have worked out a compelling offer, but equally important is the fact the same resonates with the shopper, too. So travelers must fully understand the offer from the choice that is being presented before they make a commitment. Being in a position to price continuously or offering certain content only via NDC-enabled channels won’t serve the purpose if airlines and the industry at large fail to counter the hurdles associated with displaying of richer content. Airlines need to ensure they have a way to display and sell their dynamic inventory and products/ bundles.

As carriers increasingly work on differentiating the product and tailoring offers, and highlighting the same, travel resellers, too, have an opportunity to demonstrate the value they bring to indirect selling.

A positive development in this area is a set of data standards (in NGS) being shaped by ATPCO, and the initiative to work on the same region-wise. This is expected to enable travel intermediaries to better present, sort, and find the airline products and services travel shopper are looking for. It is worth following how channels utilize the same going forward to integrate content into luring shopping displays. Travel content continues to become more complex due to branded fares, a la carte ancillaries etc. and accordingly the third party channels have to respond.  Travel aggregators are working on ways to let one request, compare, and book NDC Offers.  ATPCO’s initiative will establish common standards for amenity data, providing a simpler, intuitive, graphical representation of each product’s attributes, whether they are included in a fare or available for additional cost.

As for the interface and overall UX on OTAs, meta-search engines etc., it is expected that the travel industry is going to evolve to pull in more information from their travel shoppers about what all they are looking for and accordingly come up with ranking of offers not just fares in the search results. Comparing what all each airline has to offer on a mobile device plus enabling shoppers to take a decision accordingly is one huge undertaking that various stakeholders in the indirect distribution value chain need to take – be it for GDS, search engine, OTA etc.

 

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