American Airlines Beats Orbitz and Travelport, Amadeus Wins
The distribution landscape is changing rapidly. Winners and losers are not always obvious. Sometimes being out of the front line is the best tactic.
24/12/2010
Airlines Complete Move to Bar-Coded Boarding Passes
We first saw bar-coded boarding passes demonstrated at an IATA E-Ticket conference in 1995. A small company was trying to convince the world's airlines that they could save money and improve efficiencies by adopting technology from the supermarkets. Most airline people scoffed at the time. We had ATB2. Why would we ever change to such a cheap and nasty solution? Fifteen years on and we now understand just how short-sighted we were. Congratulations to the small business visionaries and the IATA bureaucrats who between them have pushed through a change that genuinely saves the industry billions of dollars and opens up new business processes that would have been unachievable using ATB2.
17/12/2010
AISystems has landed
Airline planning is notoriously complex and time consuming. A new product from start-up company AISystems will provide dramatic improvements in the level and timeliness of analysis for those airlines that select it.
07/12/2010
BA and Iberia Push the Frontier
A merger that creates a new European mega carrier could also be the trigger for radical thinking on IT systems.
01/12/2010
Amadeus - One More Step Ahead
Its conference for OTAs revealed some of the structural advantages that Amadeus enjoys as airlines look to exploit the online channel in a more intelligent manner.
28/11/2010
USAir and American – Different but the Same
The phoney distribution war is coming to an end and American is leading the charge. US Airways is buying itself an option. Other airlines, especially in North America, need to prepare their own positions.
27/11/2010
HP takes the PSS game to a whole new level
Hewlett-Packard announces the name of its new products and a technology licence agreement to help build them.
09/11/2010
IT(A) hits the fan !
A coalition of interested parties has created a campaign to prevent the Google acquisition of ITA Software. They probably have good reason to be concerned.
03/11/2010
Travel sites team up to block Google's proposed acquisition of airline software firm
The LA Times reports the creation of the FairSearch campaign by Sabre, Expedia and others.
03/11/2010
Navitaire and Travelport – The Best of Both Worlds
Navitaire joins other "low-cost" PSS suppliers in establishing a partnership with one of the old guard of traditional vendors. This should allow it to compete more strongly in the expanding hybrid airline sector.
29/10/2010
Air France’s Timetable for Retirement
Air France has confirmed that its hosted Passenger Services Systems will soon be closed down. There are knock-on effects for other vendors, not least Amadeus and Unisys.
07/10/2010
Sabre and Amadeus Extend their Influence in PSS
Further evidence that Sabre and Amadeus are becoming more dominant in their favoured market segments.
27/09/2010
Southwest Airlines to buy AirTran for $1.4B
Associated Press and many others report that Southwest Airlines has agreed to acquire all the shares of AirTran. This will combine the two largest hybrid airlines in North America to create a giant carrier that will board over 140 million passengers this year.
This could be a blow to Navitaire and Farelogix. Air Tran is currently Navitaire's largest North American customer and it uses Farelogix for ancillary sales but it is likely that the combined carrier will use Southwest's IT systems.
Currently Southwest uses a dedicated passenger services system provided by Sabre. In the last year Sabre has won three major customers from Navitaire as airlines coming from the low-cost tradition seek to add more complex functionality around interline and code-share.
27/09/2010
BA and Iberia merger cleared for takeoff
BA and Iberia have no further obstacles to their combination. The two oneworld carriers will have their path to merger smoothed by shared use of the Amadeus reservations platform. This will surely now confirm that Iberia will also migrate to use Altea Inventory and DCS from Amadeus. The structure of the new group allows for more airlines to be added in future. Willie Walsh is said to have a shopping list. Most of the airlines rumoured to be on it are also Amadeus customers. This is unlikely to be coincidence.
23/09/2010
Google-ITA deal gets closer DOJ scrutiny
To nobody's real surprise the United States Department of Justice is to scrutinise the proposed Google acquisition of ITA more closely. At first sight this should be a binary decision. The deal will be allowed or not allowed. Unlike with airline mergers there are no slots or routes that could be ceded to competitors in return for approval. Or could a creative bureaucrat come up with a way of allowing the deal but restricting its anti-competitive effects?
31/08/2010
Malware implicated in fatal Spanair plane crash
Reports from Spain indicate that Spanair's MRO system may have been infected by malware, leading to a failure to take out of service an aircraft with known problems. Reports have failed to identify the precise MRO system in use at Spanair but then-parent company SAS uses AuRA from MIRO technologies which definitely has a Windows component. Until now the fact that Windows is the target of most malware in the wild has been an economic issue. Perhaps now it has contributed to the loss of 154 lives.
23/08/2010
LAN / TAM Merger Will Dominate its Region
The proposed merger of LAN and TAM will create a regional giant with almost a third of all Latin American passengers. Amadeus and Sabre will be making great efforts to win the PSS business of the newly-merged airline.
18/08/2010
Brazilian airline TAM plans to merge with Chile's LAN
The BBC reports on the first Latin American mega-merger. While the new LATAM airline group will not match the major North American and European carriers for sheer size it will dominate its region more than any other airline in the world. It will also pose some delicate issues of allignement as TAM is a member of Star Alliance and uses the Amadeus PSS, LAN belongs to oneworld and is in the process of migration to Sabre. Watch this space.
13/08/2010
Ryanair Court Wins May Have Far-Reaching Effects
Ryanair often finds itself in court but in a few recent cases it has been plaintiff rather than defendant. The fact that it has won cases against screen-scrapers may have long-lasting effects.
09/08/2010
Google Loves IT(A). It’s Official!
The confirmation of Google's acquisition of ITA will have major repercussions for the whole industry.
01/07/2010
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