April 20, 2010

Ancillary Fees and Merchandizing

Tweet The media is filled with stories on airline ancillary fees especially with Spirit Airlines announcing a fee for carry-on baggage and Ryanair contemplating pay toilets.  These charges represent a much bigger change in travel distribution than simply paying for services that were previously free. From multiple industry sources it is clear to me that we are only at the […]
October 1, 2009

Global View

Tweet I am writing from Cannes, France where I gave a speech this morning on emerging technology trends that impact airline e-commerce. I represented PhoCusWright at the conference and I was able to draw on some great stats and trends from a number of PhoCusWright research pieces. This speech was for the Amadeus’ airline e-commerce conference. Last week I was […]
March 5, 2009

Full Content

Tweet Dennis Schaal, technology editor for Travel Weekly has written some very insightful articles regarding the lack of full content in the GDS (despite the full content agreement signed in 2005) and more recently the termination of the agreement between Farelogix and Sabre. (links requires a subscription). This is a complex problem that is both an issue of technology and […]
August 13, 2008

Agent POS International Innovation

Tweet My loyal blog readers will recall my frequent posts over the last few years regarding an independent travel agent point of sale (POS) application. An interesting discovery that has been a result of product analysis I am doing for a large Middle Eastern TMC is the fact there is clear trend with many European and Middle Eastern 3rd party […]
July 16, 2008

GNEs and GDS bypass

Tweet I just returned from a two week business trip to the Middle East working with a client in Kuwait. I’ve fallen behind again in my blog entries and I will try to rectify that over the next few days. First up, a discussion of a recent article in Flight Magazine about demise of the so called “GNEs” (GDS New […]
April 7, 2008

Travelport and G2Switchworks

Tweet On Friday April 4, 2008 Travelport announced that they were acquiring from G2 Switchworks “certain software assets and intellectual property to be used in the development of a future Travelport agent desktop solution.” Given all the hype of GDS verses GNE over the last four years, what does this deal mean to alternative distribution? There are a number of […]