Skift Take
If they can't beat the online travel companies, airlines might as well try to copy those companies' slickest moves. A couple of carriers are testing the display of flights on rival airlines in an attempt to prevent consumers from clicking away to shop elsewhere.
Airlines have long tried to coax travelers into booking directly instead of through online travel agencies. New technology and business strategies revealed recently may give them more tools to do so.
Until now, airlines have only shown their own flights on their branded websites. This opens an information gap, prompting most consumers to look elsewhere to comparison-shop. So airlines often lose customers to online travel companies.
Now a couple of airlines are rethinking this model by showing the availability and fares of competitor carriers next to their own.
In separate tests, Icelandair has begun experimenting with displaying a sampling of flights from other airlines in their search results. The idea is that, by showing how competitive their offering is, airlines can persuade more shoppers to buy right away.
For example, a consumer shopping on Icelandair for a round-trip between London and New York City might see, alongside the carrier's own flights, prices and details for similar flights offered by three competitor airlines.
The results on rival carriers are for-display-only. They can't be booked via the brand.com site, in part, because airlines aren't licensed as agents and don't have commercial agreements to sell travel on other carriers who aren't code-share partners.
El Al will begin testing soon.
The airline experiments were revealed during a talk Thursday at a customer conference in Houston for PROS, (Pricing and Revenue Optimization Solutions), a publicly held cloud software company.
Travelaer, a travel technology startup based in Sophia Antipolis, France, gave the proof-of-concept demonstration at the event.
Travelaer sells reservation engines to airlines. But it has cooked up a separate offering called Right Flight that enables airlines with commonly used booking engines to add basic flight-comparison in their search results.
But the product is still in trials. Most shoppers on Icelandair's website are not yet seeing the tests.
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