Skyscanner has become the first metasearch company to officially endorse the airline industry's call for new programming standards to enable consumers to see more ancillary products, such as seat upgrades and loyalty-based offers, on intermediary websites and platforms.
Today many airline websites can display product in various ways, such as no-frills or bundled offers, while metasearch sites and other intermediaries have not been able to access the same information because of a mix of technical and commercial hurdles.
Skyscanner itself, which doubled its revenues to £66 million last year, currently has no way of letting users compare side-by-side different packages, meal prices or the size of seats in its initial sort display -- let alone "personalized" offers based on a user's loyalty status.
That could change thanks to the New Distribution Capability (NDC) -- whose underlying principles received tentative approval by US authorities yesterday.
Airlines willing to play ball with meta
Some industry critics see airline reluctance to share merchandizing information as a commercial struggle for control over the relationship with customers.
After all, if airlines alone can display offers for upgraded seats, baggage fees, or free meals, then passengers will have to visit their brand.com sites to make purchases -- and airlines can build direct relationships with them.
Yet Filip Filipov, head of B2B at Skyscanner, disagrees with that view.
"If you have a roundtable with the airlines, those guys are willing and excited to sell merchandising offers through intermediaries as well....
Metasearch can aid marketing goals. Imagine you're an airline specializing in servicing routes to and from, say, Australia. It's not cost effective for you to try to acquire customers who live in, say, South America, unless you display your content through meta and similar channels."
The company says it has "begun working with carriers on what this solution might look like," though it wouldn't elaborate on what it meant by that. The company's engineers are also experimenting with dataviews, though it wouldn't share further information on its tests of how it might display attributes like ancillaries.
Skyscanner is not participating in any of five NDC pilot tests organized by IATA, the world airline industry group.
Stage one: Displaying ancillaries upfront
In the past few months, Skyscanner has become a "strategic partners" with IATA specifically on the NDC.
It joins nine other companies who already have joined, such as FareCompare, a provider of marketing optimization technologies, and Fareportal, owner of online travel agencies like Cheapoair, and airline tech firm JR Technologies.
Filipov says the first stage will be to get the merchandizing data into meta. That means airlines and Skyscanner need to set up commercial agreements to display the content and make sure their APIs are pushed to Skyscanner as required.
Some might assume ancillaries would only be displayed to a metasearch customer after they've clicked on a fare result to see additional details about it. But Filipov thinks it is reasonable to include the ancillary information in the initial first results retrieved.
For years now, Skyscanner's standard procedure has been to take the APIs it has with airlines and translate them into ones compliant with Open AXIS standards -- the same technical standard IATA has adopted for its NDC pilots.
Stage two
The dream of NDC is to eventually be able to personalize offers. So if one user is an elite member in a frequent flier program, they're shown apples-to-apples fares -- rather than be pushed a no-frills fare that doesn't account for the complimentary upgrades and services their status level earns them.
To get to that point, Skycanner would presumably have to collect loyalty information from users to be able to filter fare results in a customized way. Recently the company introduced the ability for users to log in and save their profile.
Stage three
The most ambitious part of the NDC vision is to enable the sale of airline products in a bundled way that doesn't reduce them to commoditized shopping alone.
Some carriers, like Air Canada and American Airlines, sell fare families -- something Skyscanner's existing connectivity with airlines today prevents it from adequately displaying.
Other complex products, such as Air New Zealand's SkyCouch product -- in which three seats are essentially sold for the price of two -- also can't be displayed in Skyscanner and other B2C intermediaries today.
"It'll take some experimenting to work with airlines to see what's the best way to integrate such products into the display," says Filipov.
The ultimate result would move metasearch from a tool for comparing on lowest price or shortest trip to one that compares more complicated products sorted by more customized filters.
Still a winding path ahead
Change can be slow, but it does happen.
Two years ago, all three of the main global distribution systems -- Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport resisted the NDC initiative. But as of yesterday, they now endorse its principles.
Perhaps other metasearch companies will embrace NDC, too.
For more details: IATA Case Study: Skyscanner and NDC
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