Skift Take
When the pandemic hit, some industry leaders forecast airlines and travel agencies would set aside their plans to reshape how tickets are distributed and sold. But a top executive at British Airways has some evidence to the contrary.
British Airways says it isn't letting the pandemic stop its multi-year overhaul of how it distributes its tickets to travel agencies. But a top executive conceded in an interview with Skift that it had postponed several of its planned steps to crank up the pressure on agencies to switch to its direct connects.
Some industry skeptics had expected the direct distribution pushes by large airline groups like International Airlines Group, Lufthansa Group, Air France/KLM Group, and Qantas Group to run aground during the pandemic. The effort often involves surcharges on tickets, changed financial incentives for agencies, and new technological systems that agents have to learn. The goal is to reduce indirect sales via tech partners like Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport and create new ways of selling, the carrier said.
"We were wondering what was going to happen and if the enthusiasm and the interest in our NDC proposition would decrease because we assumed some agents would be in financial difficulty," said Rogier van Enk, head of distribution and payments at British Airways. "Surprisingly, [the crisis] has increased the level of interest.
British Airways announced its biggest agency win yet last month when Reed & Mackay, the UK's largest travel management company, made a direct connection with British Airways' modern data feed (or application programming interface, or API) that gives the agency access to all of the airline's content, including content using new messaging standards, called the new distribution capability (NDC).
"We see in our numbers that, for bookings that come through NDC, the passengers there are a hundred times as likely to buy an ancillary as a passenger who booked through a GDS [global distribution system]," said van Enk.
As Skift noted earlier this month, Qantas has pursued a similar breakaway distribution strategy that has similarly drawn some grumbling from travel agencies over its disruption of a longstanding model where agents get incentives and free tech support from distribution middlemen like Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport.
