Expedia.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, CheapTickets and the corporate travel management company Egencia are all part of the Expedia Group's sizeable U.S. online airfare booking portfolio. Senior editor Robert Silk caught up with Expedia Group vice president of transport Julie Kyse at Expedia's Explore 19 conference earlier this month in Las Vegas to discuss the company's air offerings.
Q: A major complaint of airlines is that they are treated as a commodity in the OTAs. Flights are displayed ranked from cheapest to most expensive. United was especially vocal about these types of concerns during contract negotiations this summer.
Julie Kyse
A: But in the end, we figured out how to grow that pie together. So I think we came up with a win-win. We figured out a way that we could drive value across the Expedia Group platform for United. So it's not only about offering United on the leisure side, it is also about enhancing their ability to sell globally on Egencia, which is very attractive to them, because Egencia's footprint with the small to medium [business] segment is particularly attractive to airlines since they don't have the sales force capabilities to go out and secure those kind of travelers themselves. And then the third part of the opportunity is around our Expedia Partner Solutions side of things. We were able to work with them to figure out a way to help build their direct business by giving them more cross-sell with hotels on their own site and by providing better value for their MileagePlus customers through our VIP Access program.
Q: I've noticed your displays have gotten clearer when it comes to laying out for shoppers the differences between various fare products.
A: That's been a big focus of ours. Since basic economy has come on board, we've had to change our display to make sure that customers are fully informed about what they are getting, because it is so very different than what they've gotten in the past. There's also inconsistencies. If you fly basic economy domestic versus internationally, you get different things. So it's really up to us to make sure the display is there and presented the right way.
Q: This is on the purchase screen. What about on the search results? Are you doing anything there to add more emphasis to factors beyond price?
A: Yes. We're doing tests now where in the search results we're showing two prices. So we'll show the basic economy fare, and we'll also show the standard economy fare. It's currently in testing. You're not going to see that across all of the sites, but we're optimizing that.
Q: When will these multiple price results be broadly rolled out?
A: It will gradually evolve to the point where it just becomes part of the standard display. I would think within a year or so you'll see changes to the display to accommodate that we've got all these new types of fares.
Q: What steps is Expedia taking related to New Distribution Capability (NDC)?
A: I think we've been fairly instrumental in helping shape the NDC program by understanding what's needed in terms of applying it at scale, because that's really the biggest challenge with NDC right now. And there's different challenges, too, for leisure [sales] as well as TMC business. We're currently booking Lufthansa Business in an end-to-end fashion at scale on our leisure sites.
Q: Why should I book my flight through an Expedia OTA rather than an airline website?
A: One is that we can build itineraries that many of the airlines can't build. We can build split-ticket itineraries connecting two one-ways together. Also, we have a proprietary shopping engine that builds itineraries that no one else can build, because we are able to pull inventory from a variety of different sources: nonpublished content that we have, negotiated offers with the airlines. In many cases, they do discrete offers through us that they don't have elsewhere.