ARC and American Airlines are developing an electronic tool to help the airline industry identify and reduce the incidence of duplicate bookings.

When travelers hold more seats than they can use, that costs American "huge sums of money" in lost opportunities to sell those seats to others, the carrier said.

According to Shelly Younger, ARC product development manager for reporting and settlement products, ARC is assessing how big the problem is across the industry and is talking to other carriers to determine their interest in an electronic tool to tackle the problem.

Multiple carriers have to participate to make the project worthwhile, she said, noting that carriers generally can already see duplicates in their own systems. They need to see where the same passenger has booked multiple same-day trips involving different carriers. Those duplicate bookings could involve trips on the same route or on different routes.

The idea, she continued, would be to filter each participating carrier’s booking data on a "virtually real-time basis" and electronically generate a message to the relevant carriers every time there appears to be a duplicate booking.

Then it would be up to each carrier to determine how to proceed, Younger said. It also would be up to each carrier to determine how to assign responsibility if travel agents made one or more of a set of duplicate bookings.

However, it is ARC’s understanding that "the purpose of this exercise is not to generate more debit memos but to put more passengers in seats," said Allan Muten, ARC's director of strategic communications.

If there is enough carrier interest, Younger said, ARC expects to have this tool in place sometime in 2010.