After American Airlines (AA) made an unprovoked attack on Orbitz by removing their ticketing permissions from their system and after Expedia failed to reach a new contract with AA, Sabre, Inc., one of the largest GDSs that form the backbone of IT for thousands of travel agents and the owner of Travelocity, has “de-preferenced” American Airline flights.
On January 1st, Expedia removed AA tickets from their inventory and today Travelocity has de-preferenced the AA tickets, which means that they will be buried several pages deep in any ticket and airfare search results. All of the work that AA has done in foisting additional hidden ancillary fees on passengers in order to remain at the top of the results of airfare searches is now for naught.
The Consumer Travel Alliance (CTA) has been involved in fighting AA’s strong-arm tactics as this conflict between the fourth largest airline and the third largest online travel agency began in December. At that time the alliance released a statement.
At its core, this dispute has nothing to do with business agreements, legal arguments, or distribution technologies. This is simply a heavy-handed attempt by American Airlines to prevent consumers from easily searching and comparing its fares against those of other airlines. In short, the only ‘direct connect’ American really seems to want is a ‘direct connect’ to consumers’ wallets.
American appears to have no idea why we fly. We fly to get from point A to point B in the most convenient and cost-effective manner possible. We don’t fly to be manipulated by proprietary airline reservation systems that limit our choices, prevent comparison shopping, and hide the real cost of travel.
“American should end its strong-arm tactics and abandon this anti-consumer direct connect program. The Consumer Travel Alliance encourages American to launch a renewed effort to listen to its customers and partners about the services they actually want and need, instead of trying to force feed us a ‘direct connect’ to higher prices, less choice, and limited competition.
AA’s attempt to impose a new, untested and flawed model that heaps huge new costs on the travel industry and diminishes comparison shopping for consumers only serves to make discovering the total airfare even harder.
Though AA has noted that they only want to move to their new direct-connect system so that they can better inform passengers of ancillary fee costs, they have not, to date made any new fees more transparent in their new system.
The AA website is still as opaque as it was prior to this battle over the imposition of direct-connect over the IT systems that have been in place for almost 40 years. If AA is serious about providing consumers more transparent pricing, there is already an outlet (ironically, airline-owned) called ATPCO that has a tested system to publish all ancillary fees. So far, while claiming they are “consumer-friendly,” AA has refused to release these fees and they talk about the promise of releasing the fees the airline wants to release, when they want to release them, through their own proprietary system.
Most consumer-friendly companies provide travelers with a menu of services and fees, then allow passengers to select those services that that they want to purchase. AA chooses to withhold these fees from travel agents and their clients. Next, through their new-fangled direct-connect they plan to only present fees to passengers as AA sees fit, based on what they think the market will bear. Excuse me, but AA has the shoe on the wrong foot.
Now, with the largest online travel agents, who provide the “storefront” for AA, refusing to play along with these anti-consumer efforts by American Airlines, the “consumer-friendly” airline (yes, the same one that brought airline passengers the first-piece-of-luggage charges) will have a tough decision to make — serve their passengers, or serve themselves.
One would think that in an industry that depends on customer service, the passengers would come out on top. However, with American Airlines, history shows the opposite.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
