Agents have defied airline efforts to drive customers direct and continue to make a majority of flight bookings, according to a former head of sales at British Airways.
Bernard Harrop, managing director of airline consultancy IG Management, said the complexity of modern distribution has given agents an advantage despite the simplification of fare structures.
He told an audience of aviation executives at The Future of Air Transport conference in London last week: “Look at the mess of distribution. The complexity is a nightmare, with global distributions systems, web searches, direct sales, online portals and community websites.
“Confusion reigns and agents can pull everything together. It has become the raison d’etre for agents. They can say to clients, ‘Let us sort it out for you’”.
He quoted figures for 2005 by US analyst PhoCusWright suggesting the average airline still depends on traditional agents for 58% of bookings and takes less than one-quarter of that (14%) direct.
Of the remainder, 11% go through online retailers such as Expedia and Lastminute.com and 17% through call centres.
Harrop, who was at BA in the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, said: “It was drummed into me at BA that airlines want to control distribution because they don’t want travel agents switching passengers to other airlines.”
But he said the focus on price by carriers is pushing premium traffic towards business travel agents.
“The big corporations are dissatisfied with the airlines because they can’t get everything they want. Corporations are spending fortunes on software to try to pull together management information from different sources.
“But there is also a level of dissatisfaction with travel management companies (TMCs) because of their service delivery and costs,” said Harrop.
“The airlines have missed a trick. They should stop focusing on price and yield and think how to get to the business traveller. Why hand control back to the TMCs?”