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Northwest drops agency booking fees
Northwest Airlines has been forced into a climb-down over charging US and Canadian travel agents GDS fees.
The move to impose charges on selling Northwest’s US domestic flights – condemned by agent bodies and GDS’s in North America as “ill-conceived” – was dropped after wide-ranging industry protests.
Northwest had hoped the tactic would drive bookings to its website.
But Bruce Bishins, president of Toronto-based booking system Genesis, said: “The Northwest GDS fee sharing plan and its quick demise proved one thing – travel agencies and the systems which power them are a formidable marriage of salesmanship and technology, an essential alliance which the world’s mainline carriers simply cannot afford to eliminate.”
He added: “If there is one lesson to be learned from Northwest’s retreat from debiting travel agencies who refused to book Northwest exclusively via the airline’s web site, it is this: the agency community must finally recognise that channelling reservations and ticketing through a single booking platform would dramatically increase the agency distribution channel’s ability to wield enormous power in influencing and maintaining fair and equitable relationships with the airlines.
“The emperor finally has no clothes – Northwest has proven without a doubt that its dismissiveness of the importance of travel agencies and the booking systems agents support are all-important and indispensable to Northwest’s ability to sell seats. The days of ‘everyone will book on our web site’ are finally over.”
The Association of Canadian Travel Agents had described Northwet’s plan to impose charges on agents over GDS’s as “a badly camouflaged effort to pass on the cost of its expensive business model to travel agencies and ultimately to consumers rather than a strategy to become more competitive”.
Report by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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