The B-word is back. B as in Bias.
It was the dirty little secret of the CRS wars until the
government figured out that if Airline A installed its computer
system in the offices of Travel Agent B, then Airline C might never
find itself at the top of Screen One, even when it deserved to be
there.
Airline A (and U, and all the rest) never admitted there was any
bias in their CRS systems. Some refused to concede that the
government had any business poking its nose into their screen
displays. But 15 years ago the old Civil Aeronautics Board stepped
up to the plate and outlawed bias with a fairly straightforward
rule: CRS systems could arrange the flights on the screen in any
logical (or illogical) order, as long as they applied neutral
selection criteria to all flights. No preference could be given to
any flight by virtue of the airline's identity.
The reason was simple: The users of the CRS systems were travel
agents, who held themselves out to the public as "neutral"
representatives of the airlines. The government said travelers had
the right to expect that their agents' primary working tool, the
CRS system, is reasonably free of overt bias.
The belief persisted that "subtle forms of bias" lived on, but
most agents figured out how to deal with the imperfections, and,
gradually, the B-word faded away.
Until now.
Now the very airlines that invented bias are creating a Web site
using new technologies that leapfrog the CRSs that agents still
depend on. They brag that Orbitz is "unbiased," a curious claim
coming from a bunch of guys who spent the last 20 years assuring us
that their CRS systems are "unbiased."
There's a B-word for that, too.
We suggest that the airlines find a way to hype their new baby
in a way that doesn't involve bad-mouthing 30,000 travel agents for
using the "biased" product that they themselves invented a
generation ago.