The Business Travel Magazine Feb/Mar 2019

TMCs / Travel tech
launch of low-cost carriers, who
refined the art of charging for
everything beyond the aircraft seat, and the
realisation by legacy carriers that they could
only compete – especially on short-haul
routes – if they did the same, ancillaries have
been a common but unwelcome part of
corporate life. Now hotels are following suit.
Making extras add up
Wifi, speedy boarding, inflight meals,
additional bags, hotel breakfast, parking…
the list is long and varied and if there were
any doubt as to the value of these niggly
intruders into the cost of travel, airline
ancillary revenue alone is forecast to hit
$93billion in 2018, according to a report by
IdeaWorksCompany and CarTrawler.
Rouse adds ground transport to that
equation. “One travel manager was saying
that someone can purchase a £75 flight but
will tack on a £50 transfer at each end of the
journey and on a return trip. That is £200 on
transfers and £75 on air,” he says. “We are
able to feed multiple sources of data into our
reporting and when people book outside the
travel programme, we can feed all that back
in to give a more complete
picture to the travel manager
of what the spend is on and
outside their programme.” It is
increasingly common for TMCs to
be able to gather up this off-channel
spend and bring it to book.
And NDC just adds to the problem.
“NDC presents airlines with the
opportunity to break out ancillaries
and present them to the consumer,
who can pick and choose what they
want,” says Head of Innovation for
Advantage Travel Partnership, Fraser Nicol.
“But unless agents have developed systems
to gather that information, I don’t think many
will be able to serve it up in any detail; that
will take off at the back end of next year.”
However, NDC might also lead to discrimination,
with two people on the same flight
travelling at different fares.
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