MINNEAPOLIS -- Northwest Airlines is offering travel agencies a
$5-per-ticket incentive to book Northwest fares on the airline's
Web site for agents, www.worldagentdirect.com.
Under terms of the offer, which holds through Dec. 31, agents
who book a Northwest air-hotel vacation package on the Web site
earn $10 per booking.
Despite the airline's bid to move bookings to the Internet,
agencies contacted by Travel Weekly said the commissions are not a
strong enough incentive to drive volume to Northwest's agency Web
site.
"Booking at the agency site takes away from the productivity on
our GDS, which could hurt us worse than $5 per ticket," said Ruth
Wirtz, owner of Travel Innovations in Wayzata, Minn.
"And as an old-fashioned travel counselor, I'd really hate to
book away from the GDS because it increases our workload."
Art Dahl, president of Northwestern Travel Management in
Minneapolis, agreed.
"As far as serving customers productively, Northwest's site
doesn't fit into the flow very well of what an agent is doing,"
Dahl said.
Although Northwest's agency site allows ARC reporting, bookings
don't merge into his agency's accounting system, said Kevin
Hamilton, general manager of Spartan Travel in East Lansing,
Mich.
So, when the agency compiles reports for corporate clients,
information on bookings from Northwest's site must be entered
manually.
Hamilton added that changes are more difficult to make at
Northwest's site and that the agency loses out on GDS segment
revenue by booking on the site.
The site does give agents access to Northwest's Web fares, but
Hamilton said Xpedition, the Web-search tool his agents use,
provides access to Northwest's Web fares -- and the Web fares of
other carriers -- more efficiently.
"There's little incentive for travel agencies to use the site,"
Hamilton said. "We appreciate Northwest is looking at Internet
options [that cut distribution costs] but it doesn't work for
us."
Northwest spokesman Kurt Ebenhoch acknowledged that the issue of
GDS productivity is "a business decision every agency has to make"
but said Northwest needed to try to reduce its GDS bill, which
figures to total about $200 million in 2002 and is growing at a
clip of 7% per year.
Addressing the problem of re-entering data into accounting
systems, Ebenhoch said, "We're looking at a number of enhancements
in the future that will address this."