For months, executives of airlines and GDSs have said that a key barrier to travel agents being able to handle clients' fees for checked bags, premium seats, meals and other add-ons was a lack of technology standards for displaying such products and services.
What's more, the fact that each airline was developing its own proprietary solution was making implementation slow, complex and expensive. So establishing standards, these executives said, would eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel each time an airline wants to introduce merchandising technology.
In late December, IATA and the Airline Tariff Publishing Co., in cooperation with airlines and GDSs, quietly completed Edifact and XML messaging standards for optional services, paving the way for carriers and the distribution systems to adopt and implement them.
But while many in the industry are calling the new standards a great first step, it could take years for airlines to implement them.
Two factors are conspiring to keep these optional services out of the GDSs: the state of the economy, with airlines unwilling to throw precious IT resources into the effort, and the view by some carriers that keeping optional services exclusively on their websites and other airline channels is a competitive advantage.
Kyle Moore, vice president of product marketing for Sabre Travel Network, said adoption of the standards was crucial so the carriers could "quickly facilitate the merchandising options that best fit their operation and strategy."
However, Moore said, "We fully anticipate that it will take several years for many airlines to complete all the systems enhancements to support these new standards."
Steve Lott, IATA's head of communications for North America, said he was "glad to debunk the myth" that the industry lacked a technology blueprint.
In fact, Edifact, or Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport, is a decades-old, mainframe-based messaging protocol widely used by airlines and GDSs. XML, or extensible markup language, is a Web-based standard that has been widely adopted across multiple industries and is already commonly used by online travel agencies and suppliers.
"So the bottom line is that the standards are out there, and it is only a question of implementation," Lott said.
IATA and the Air Transport Association led an Optional Services task force and published related business rules in 2007 that dealt with the technical specifications for new data elements in ticketing and reservations procedures. That led to the task force that completed the Edifact and XML messaging standards late last year.
Valyn Perini, executive director of the OpenTravel Alliance, which specializes in XML standards, said that one important aspect of airline merchandising was not dealt with in the new IATA standards: the introduction of branded fares or fare families, such as AirFairs from Frontier and Tango fares from Air Canada.
The alliance, Perini said, might form a work group in the second half of 2009 to tackle standards for branded fares.