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Lastminute.com outsources air fare management
Lastminute.com claims to be able to offer travel agents and consumers a record choice of airline fares and routes following an outsourcing deal with air fare management company Gateway.
Gateway is to assume responsibility for loading all of lastminute.com’s negotiated UK scheduled fares from more than 90 airlines.
Agents booking through lastminute.com or its trade portal holidayandmore.com will have access to 3,000 fares a week from carriers including Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines.
This will enable agents to source and book the latest fares released into Europe’s “volatile” air market, according to Gateway.
The company is responsible for processing promotional fares, guaranteeing these deals are available to agents more quickly than elsewhere in the market.
Lastminute.com airline account manager Graham Townsley said: “The extent of lastminute.com’s contracts with carriers creates a vast number of fares and routings for us to handle.
“When we decided to update our nett fare database and loading technology, we explored the outsource options and Gateway offered the best service and solution as well as an attractive price proposition.”
Gateway managing director Valere Vandecruys added: “Advanced technology and data processing techniques in the air sector is enabling agents to instantly offer their customers a far wider choice of fares and routings.
“Outsourcing air fare management is now saving companies across the industry the cost of maintaining their own fares databases, and means they can cope with the sheer rate of change in the highly volatile European air sector. As a result the outsourced air fare management market is set to explode.”
Gateway’s two-fold data entry technique sees all fares entered by two people and manually crosschecked to ensure accuracy.
The company has won more than 1,400 customers, from travel agents and consolidators to airlines, across 11 European countries including the UK, Germany and France.
Report by Phil Davies
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