Amadeus enhances selling opportunities for hoteliers and travel agencies

By BA Staff 

Amadeus, a leading technology partner for the global travel industry, announced the launch of the Amadeus Hotels Select web portal that allows hoteliers to promote their deals and offers directly to travel agents in Asia Pacific.

For the first time, Amadeus travel agents will benefit from access to exclusive hotel rates and special offers from over 1,100 hotels worldwide in just a few clicks with Amadeus Hotels Select. By consolidating all the latest hotel promotional content on a single online platform, this will allow increased efficiency for travel agents, reducing the time needed for them to sieve through extensive data.

Kartikeya Tripathi, Head of Hotel Distribution, Amadeus Asia Pacific, said:
Global Distribution System (GDS). This means that travel agents not only have instant visibility on promotional offers and deals, but with a single click of a button, can book the hotels. Travel agents will be able to improve customer service by offering better deals faster, customised to the traveller’s needs.

“This win-win situation offers enhanced selling opportunities for both parties, bringing our hotel partners closer to our travel agency customers. Participating hoteliers can now highlight their best and latest offers instantly to a wide network of travel agents. This allows them the much needed agility and flexibility to communicate special offers.”

Real-time online access is vital in today’s landscape, as travellers are increasingly comparing travel agency offers with options from consumer websites and reviews.  Amadeus’ second Asia Pacific hotel distribution survey, which examined the views of more than 1,000 travel agents in Asia Pacific, said that today 62 per cent of travellers conduct price comparisons compared to 48 per cent in 2010.

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Lufthansa to start charging fees for advance seat reservations

by Devesh Agarwal

German flag carrier Deutsche Lufthansa will start charging passengers fees for advance seat reservations (ASR). However, unlike fellow European carrier British Airways, Lufthansa will limit its fee to economy class as of now.

From November 26, 2013, for a fee of 10 euros Lufthansa passengers can reserve in advance, their preferred seat in economy class when booking flights on German and European routes. For emergency exit row seating, which offers more legroom, the fee is 20 euros on European routes and 60 euros on intercontinental flights. In the mid-price and flexible booking classes in Economy, advance seat reservations will be free.

HON Circle Members and Senators as well as companions travelling with them are exempt from the ASR fees. Initially these seat reservations can only be made from sales through the Lufthansa Service Center and at Lufthansa ticket counters, and at travel agencies. They will also be available on-line from spring 2014 for flights booked at the Lufthansa website.

Seats will be available free of charge during online check-in 23 hours in advance of the flight.

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Virgin America to take delivery of 6 A320s in the first half of 2012 (and other news)

Late last week, San Francisco based Virgin America announced their latest destination, Philadelphia, which will be served from Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Flights will begin in April with two daily flights from LA and one from San Francisco, and will increase to 3 and two daily flights respectively.

Schedules for the new routes are as follow: (via airlineroute)

Los Angeles – Philadelphia

VX124 LAX1055 – 1900PHL 320 Daily
VX126 LAX1540 – 2355PHL 320 Daily
VX130 LAX2135 – 0545+1PHL 320 Daily

VX121 PHL0700 – 0955LAX 320 Daily
VX125 PHL1125 – 1425LAX 320 Daily
VX127 PHL2005 – 2255LAX 320 Daily

San Francisco – Philadelphia

VX136 SFO0830 – 1655PHL 320 Daily
VX144 SFO2300 – 0725+1PHL 320 Daily

VX137 PHL0835 – 1155SFO 320 Daily
VX141 PHL1750 – 2110SFO 320 Daily

The routes will be operating from common usage gates in Philadelphia's terminal E.

We spoke with Virgin America's media team regarding the new route and some other occurrences at the airline.

Last year, Virgin America CEO David Cush told me in an interview that their A320s occasionally struggle to make East Coast- West Coast (US) flights nonstop, necessitating the A319s in their fleet. Thus I was surprised to see that Philadelphia was scheduled to be served solely with Airbus A320s. However, Virgin America spokesperson Abby Lunardini stated that there were "No restrictions for PHL, so right now [the flight is] operating on 320s." However, it remains to be seen whether or not the A320s will make this route all the time next winter, and Lunardini did mention that, " as with other East Coast routes, we [can] operate a mix of A319s and A320s on the route depending on time of year flying."

I was also interested to ask about Virgin America's growth plans. Since its inception in 2007, Virgin America has been the fastest growing US airline, with annual capacity increases hovering around 30%. A figure in the ballpark of 30% for Virgin America was quoted in 2011 by Aviation Week, however, the carrier will be taking delivery of six A320s in the first half of 2012 – which will be the total number of aircraft that they take new delivery of this year. 6 new planes would likely necessitate increased utilization of current aircraft to meet capacity targets. Virgin America neglected to provide specific capacity guidance for 2012.

Virgin America had a few teething problems problems with their reservation systems earlier this month, after switching from an upstart reservations system back to industry leader Sabre. We expect this move to improve their visibility amongst business travelers. However, the switch did result in a few customer service issues for Virgin America passengers; with reduced website functionality and unsatisfactory call center performance.

To their credit, Virgin America owned up to the issues when questioned, and they believe that the worst of the problems are now behind them.

Here is what Lunardini had to say on the issue of the reservation systems:

Yes, the overwhelming majority of web issues have been resolved – and bookings are operating normally. By way of further background,reservations systems switches of this scale are a once in a lifetime event for an airline, involving the knife-edge migration of millions of records during live operations. Prior to the switch, we additionally staffed our operation, thinned our flight schedules and communicated to guests in advance about the potential impacts. Although our airports ran on time and without related cancellations, as an airline that prides itself on its guest service –we never like to see guests inconvenienced for any reason, including the web errors a sub-set of guests were encountering (ability to change/cancel online,check-in, view Elevate points and other web services) as well as unacceptably long call hold times. We apologized to impacted guests and offered 5000 Elevate points for those guests most impacted.

We made the switch to Sabre because of our growth. We needed to move to an industry standard system that would accommodate our growth, allow us to expand our code-share/interline ability and give guests and teammates better tools.

All told, some interesting news from San Francisco. Readers, do you have a question or thought about Virgin America? Please do let us know via a comment below.

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