Travelport and Amadeus separately announced they reached full-content agreements with Frontier Airlines and will be working on giving their travel agency customers access to the airline's optional Stretch seating.
Stretch seating, an ancillary service, offers a minimum of 36 inches of seat pitch in the front rows of Frontier's Airbus, Embraer 190 and Embraer 170 aircraft.
Depending on the fare option the traveler chooses, Stretch seating's costs range from free to $15 per segment.
Travel agents using the Travelport and Amadeus GDSs have been unable to book Stretch seating for clients unless they access the ancillary service on Frontier's website or other airline channels.
So, how will the two global distribution systems make Stretch seating available for travel agencies and what is the timetable?
Jill Brenner, a Travelport spokeswoman, says Frontier Stretch seating should be available to Travelport GDS customers by the fourth quarter of 2011 or first quarter of 2012.
Travelport and Frontier will implement the Stretch seating using the ATPCO optional services standard and both the airline and Travelport GDS need to complete work on IATA's Electronic Miscellaneous Documents ] [pdf]to get it in place, Brenner says.
"Longer-term, Stretch will also be available through the Travelport Universal API and Travelport Universal Desktop, Brenner says.
Amadeus, meanwhile, was treating its Stretch seating rollout plans like a state secret.
"Technology specifications related to customer agreements are proprietary and therefore, as a general policy, we do not typically disclose that information," says Amadeus spokeswoman Debra Iannaci. "But, we are currently working with Frontier on the implementation planning for their ancillary offerings. And we look forward to communicating the details with our travel agency customers accordingly."
Sabre, too, has a full-content agreement with Frontier Airlines and spokeswoman Nancy St. Pierre says "we're working on getting this into the Sabre GDS."
Frontier, a subsidiary of Republic Airways Holdings, has routes to 80 destinations in the U.S., Mexico and Costa Rica.