Mr. BoH

BCD definitely has the issue. In addition to seeing live instances of it, there is a big announcement at the top of our BCD landing page basically saying "we can't show all AA fares, but don't book outside BCD because that is against corp policy"

USFlyerUS

We don't have a BCD landing page, so I guess I'm not sure how that impacts us. We use Concur, which sends everything to BCD for ticketing behind the scenes.

seawolf

No issue with AA O-fares on my corporate booking site. It's entirely dependent on your corporate agency and where they are in adoption.

Dave Noble

That has to be one of the wrst analogies ever. There is no similarity between the 2. This is simply that 3rd party booking agents can no longer book certain fares unless they use the new booking procoess.

Seems to me that it is just a case that an agency will decide that it will not be impacted in its sales if it chooses not to use that process or that it will decide that it needs to comply

Unless you are the person responsible for the corporate agreement with the agency, it has little reason to be overly concerned over your personal desires

A better analogy might be certain special airline fares or hotel rates that are only available for online purchase. If you insist on booking by phone, then you will have to settle for tates that are higher. You then need to choose whether to pay higher rates, stay somewhere else or back down and book online

Mr. BoH

You are correct that this is a better analogy. And to extend it a bit further to make it even more similar to what is happening here, it is as if every other airline in the US let travel agents make said online reservations via Internet Explorer or Chrome, but American said "no, if you want these fares you need to download Firefox", and (some/most) travel agencies said "no", so their customers have to call by phone and take the higher fares if they want to fly AA. Which is obviously a scenario that favors neither AA nor the travel agent in the long run - they are basically playing a game of chicken to see who blinks first.

seawolf

All these attempts at analogies are missing the mark as they are leaving out the significance on why this is even happening to begin with and that is AA is paying for distribution cost and current sales channel do not support add-ons. Neither the USPS or this browser model address this.

AA already arrived at the conclusion based on their data that it is better for them in the long run. As stated previously, only 40% of tickets are thru travel agents and only a subset of that is affected.

TBD

Perhaps if you tried to understand the analogy, which was in response to this:
It is AA's fault. AA made a change that 'breaks' industry standards. You imply that the TMCs should be ready & accomodating simply because they had advanced notice. Advance notice doesn't make a decision right, appropriate, or even rational.

USFlyerUS

Very true. But this also doesn't mean that companies that want to fly with AA need to stick with agencies that don't support the required functionality. There are CTAs that do.

TBD

Also true.
But major corporations with multi-national presence (a) don't move quickly, and (b) are restricted in which alternative CTAs they can even implement.
There's a reason that nearly all of the top 100 corporations (by travel spend) in the world use BCD, CWT, or GBT. They are the only truly global TMCs out there that can handle high-volume and high-complexity corporate environments. They also happen to be the three agencies most impacted by AA'd NDC maneuver.

It's like a FMCG company trying to cut Walmart out of US sales.

USFlyerUS

I'm still perplexed why we aren't seeing an issue with BCD. I asked our corporate travel folks, and they weren't aware of any issues either.

seawolf

All this has already been covered earlier in this thread.

NDC is IATA industry standard. Rationale is lower distribution cost and support selling add-ons now that fares are unbundled.

Industry encountered similar with disruption/adoption of e-tickets and web sales (eg. who needs travel agent when paper ticket is not longer involve and passenger can buy online). Travel agent sales plummeted from >90% to 40% today.

Already covered back in post#100. Airlines (not just AA) have been pushing for this for at least >5 years. NDC is based on XML (which webpages are also based upon) and this is >20 years old. It does not take 5 years to adopt if parties were willing.

Fundamentally, the airline is trying to lower cost where these costs are the revenue for GDS/travel agent so of course the later will slow walk adoption. As the later are beyond airline control and are just dragging out adoption, the only way to get things moving along is to draw a line in the sand which is what AA is doing. AA has provided alternatives to corporate customers to access their corporate fares directly on AA website.

Agencies couldn't stop adoption of e-ticket and online sales and airlines reducing commissions even when they issued >90% of tickets. If history is a guide, they won't be able to stop adoption of NDC either.

VFR

They may already have NDC, or may have negotiated a deal with AA to retain access to GDS fares (presumably until they can get NDC implemented).

It seems to be a bit like EDI in the corporate world -- it's a "standard" but everyone implements the standard slightly differently, so if you have m travel agencies and n airlines you have to test m * n combinations (assuming all travel agencies want to book with all airlines). Implementing this is easier (but still not trivial and a significant expense) for the GBTs of the world, and a significant obstacle for smaller and mom-and-pop travel agencies (who will likely be pushed into a solution like Sabre's attenuated NDC capability).

seawolf

There are 3rd party solutions for smaller agencies. They are essentially competing with traditional GDS. GDS has high barrier of entry for new competitors but NDC (and cloud) lowers that.

https://www.exploreamerican.com/glob...alities-chart/

For corporates, another option is direct book with AA.

Yes, AA is disrupting GDS business model but this is not new since the spread of the web. At the end of the day, GDS need airlines more than the airlines need GDS.

TBD

AA didn't need to selectively remove content in order to change their communications standard.
I suppose we're going to find out if that's true. At the moment, you might translate that to: AA thinks corporates need AA more than AA needs corporates.

seawolf

As mentioned, GDS weren't eagerly adopting given several years notice so it's time to turn up the pain otherwise AA and GDS would still be in the same position 5 years from now.

AA provides alternative booking channels for corporate. I'm with a multi-national. Not only can we book direct with AA even prior to COVID, our agency booking tool (Concur) access the same cheapest bucket fare as AA.com (just checked this week).

AA has thought this strategy thru as they are blocking out just the cheap fares. The airline industry has a better handle on managing capacity these days so any loss of corporate business on "cheap fares" is just going to be filled in by leisure passengers.

The question is which is more important to corporations? Airlines or their current corporate agent? Will corporate accounts push their existing agent to NDC (or switch to a different agent that do support NDC)? Switching agents is not as difficult from an implementation perspective (integration to T&E/accounting systems and user change management) than an airline network that is critical to some company's operations.