Travelport and United Airlines extended their GDS full-content agreement, modified to give agents access to Economy Plus seating upgrades through Travelport’s Galileo, Worldspan and Apollo systems.
Travelport, whose extension with United goes to 2013, will later this year provide its GDS users the ability to upgrade United passengers to the carrier’s Economy Plus seating, which has as many as five more inches of legroom than regular economy and is positioned toward the front of the economy cabin.
Travelport will also add United’s Economy Plus inventory to its Travelport Universal Desktop interface "over time," the company said.
The inclusion of Economy Plus may be a first step toward providing travel agents widespread access to airline ancillary services through Travelport, whose primary U.S. competitor, Sabre, started offering similar capabilities involving United’s Economy Plus seating last year.
Travelport’s announcement also follows by about six weeks Sabre’s unveiling of Sabre Red, a Windows-based user interface designed to enable fare calculations that include ancillary fees. Sabre Red has been rolled out to a few hundred customers and will be available to most Sabre subscribers by the end of the year.
Even so, the days of agents having comprehensive access and booking capability for items like extra baggage and onboard WiFi might still be far in the future.
"There remain significant hurdles, both technical and financial," said Douglas Quinby, senior director of research at PhoCusWright, noting that items such as agreed-upon standards for messaging and back-end processing haven’t been ironed out.
United’s willingness to publish Economy Plus upgrades through Travelport’s GDSs is illustrative of a carrier that leapfrogged American last year to become the largest generator of ancillary fees among all airlines, according to a report released last month by research firm IdeaWorks and Amadeus.
United, which started charging economy passengers a $25 fee each way for a second bag in May 2008, generated $2.17 billion in ancillary fees in 2009 and accounted for 15% of a global ancillary-fee total that surged 43% last year, the report said.