IT and Distribution Article Archive

Retailing is not easy, especially in an industry that has no tradition of true product differentiation.

But according to Gianni Cataldo, general manager and vice president for the Americas at Datalex, at least one airline is close to getting it right.

Datalex has been working with Delta Air Lines on its online merchandising platform, and Cataldo provided some pointers gleaned from the experience at the OpenTravel Alliance Advisory Forum in Miami.

First, he said, the carrier hired a retailing pro, “the e-commerce guy from Target.”

For several years, airlines have yearned to adopt “merchandising,” a term that is applied indiscriminately to everything from fare families to checked-bag fees.Depending on who is doing the talking, they are held back by their own systems, which don’t easily accommodate innovations in how products are sold, or by the global distribution systems, which some airlines accuse of dragging their feet on investment in new technology.

News from Travel Technology Update: IATA waded into the controversy over the optimal method of distributing ancillary products, claiming that GDSs “are unable to handle the rapidly increasing range of product offerings from airlines.”

United Airlines’ weekend migration to the Hewlett Packard SHARES system used by Continental, its merger partner, got mixed reviews: As Henry Harteveldt, an analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, said, it was “a success on the technology level but less of a success on the customer-experience front.”

In the final major step in the integration of the two carriers, United successfully moved its reservations, inventory control and departure control systems off the Apollo platform, where they had resided for more than 40 years, and onto SHARES.