When British Airways and Iberia announced plans to surcharge
global distribution system bookings in May, comparisons to Lufthansa Group were
hard to shake. As Lufthansa did in 2015, the International Airlines Group
carriers this year opted out of full content deals with GDSs, surcharged those
bookings and offered direct booking alternatives for travel buyers to avoid the
fee.
Eyeing its moves in distribution, CEO Willie Walsh told
investors in November 2016: "We are not going to model this on what anyone
else has done because we are not the same as Lufthansa, for example. What they
have done may have worked for Lufthansa. It is not necessarily what will work
for us."
With the creation of a "private channel" for
select travel agencies to avoid the surcharge when booking through GDSs, IAG
certainly distinguished its corporate travel distribution approach from
Lufthansa's—and, for that matter, Air France-KLM, which followed IAG in
announcing its own GDS surcharge.
Amadeus was the first GDS to enable a private channel
framework with IAG. Sabre and Travelport followed. In this model, IAG invited travel
agencies to continue to transact through the GDS but spared their clients from
paying 8 British pounds per fare component or a local currency equivalent.
This was welcome news to travel buyers whose TMCs avoided
the cost and got to preserve established processes for booking travel. Still,
IAG's private channel created a bifurcated world of corporate travel
distribution. While the mega TMCs and most of the largest corporate agencies in
BA's home market received a private channel nod, it left other agencies that
don't get such a deal at a price disadvantage. This has troubled the have-nots
in the agency community.
This year, Walsh said IAG was gunning for "structural
change" in distribution, adding, "the nature of the relationship
between GDSs and airlines is not sustainable, and we want to get that changed."
The change has come.