PAL inks marketing deal with Travelport

Business Mirror
May 25, 2009

Philippine Airlines (PAL) and Travelport, one of the world’s largest travel conglomerates, signed a three-year global-marketing agreement that enables Galileo, Apollo and Worldspan connected travel agents to access automated market fares and take advantage of additional functionality until the end of 2011.

The Travelport deal includes two strategic solutions for PAL’s customers with the implementation of Octopus Travel hotel content on the PAL website and the use of Travelport Rapid Reprice, an automated ticket-repricing product.

Octopus Travel, Travelport’s innovative online travel company, provides hotel content on PAL’s web site (http://www.philippineairlines.com/hotels), giving customers’ access to more than 21,000 hotels in 129 countries. The expanded hotel offering provides customers with a wide mix of lodgings at affordable prices ranging from one to five star hotels, international chains to small boutique hotels. Customers can also compare prices, view hotel locations and evaluate hotel amenities.

PAL also becomes the first Asian carrier to implement Travelport Rapid Reprice, which enables PAL to recalculate a ticket reflecting the appropriate taxes, additional collections, refunds, penalties or administrative fees. The automated product minimizes revenue leakage from miscalculated collections and fees that remain inherent in a manual repricing process.

It also virtually eliminates debit memos due to superior data integrity and repricing accuracy. The solution facilitates repricing of tickets irrespective of the booking system that the ticket was issued on.

“We are glad to work with Travelport in offering new cutting-edge, automated services to our customers. It enhances the features of our website through Octopus Travel as well as the convenience of an automated re-pricing tool and refund for our sales offices through Rapid Reprice,” said Enrique Javier, PAL for sales.

“This partnership with Travelport gives our customers a wider choice of hotels while browsing PAL’s web site [Octopus trave], over and above the accommodations included in PAL’s tour packages [PALakbayan and Swingaround],” he added.

Brad Holman, President and managing director of Travelport GDS-Asia Pacific said, “We are celebrating three ‘firsts’ in the Philippines today. This signing represents the first marketing agreement between PAL and Travelport. It also marks Rapid Reprice’s first airline customer in Asia, as well as PAL’s expanded hotel choice for customers with its tie-up with Octopus Travel.”

“Travelport works closely with our airline partners to provide them with products that help them stay ahead of the competition, improve the overall customer experience, grow revenue while also keeping costs as pared down as possible. Airline ticket reissue headaches can be a thing of the past with Rapid Reprice. The product dramatically reduces the number of key strokes involved in repricing a ticket from around 500 strokes to less than 10, thus improving the airline’s productivity, efficiency and accuracy,” Holman added.

Travelport’s Rapid Reprice™ is used by airlines to automate the complex, time-consuming itinerary repricing function. Rapid Reprice automatically integrates fare and rule categories from SITA and Airline Tariff Publishing Co. (ATPCO) including voluntary changes, net fares, private fares and fare-by-rule.

Travelport Rapid Reprice has been delivering financial rewards to some of the world’s largest carriers including United Airlines, Delta and Emirates. The product was first launched in 1999 via the Worldspan GDS platform and more than 27 million transactions were processed using Travelport Rapid Reprice last year.

More than 100 million fully automated transactions have been processed since launch, demonstrating the product’s unique functionality and scalability.