Travel Weekly Digital Edition

ARC, IATA partner to sell airlines IATA data in an ARC format

By Andrew Compart

ARC and IATA reached a joint marketing and licensing agreement that could help them sell more global data to airlines, and both said it could be a forerunner to other, similar arrangements.

IATA, which operates the Billing Settle-

ment Plan that is the international equivalent of ARC, has a Passenger Intelligence Services product that includes ticket information from 394 airlines in 156 countries. The database includes agency, country and region of ticket issuance as well as fare categories, average fare value and airport information.

Under the new IATA-ARC agreement, the Passenger Intelligence Services data will be offered in the ARC Segment Detail Specification format, which is a file structure ARC uses for the ARC Itinerary Detail product and plans to use for future data products.

ARC officials said ARC was working on

providing its data in IATA’s format.

ARC’s Itinerary Detail provides daily segment information for 38 data elements, including origin and destination airport; class of service; departure and arrival details; and marketing carrier for each travel segment. The reports reflect sales, refunds and exchanges and can provide up to 39 months of historical data.

ARC officials said the agreement means airlines that buy the similar databases from both ARC and IATA won’t have to spend the time, effort and money required to re-format them on their own to put them together into a global database. That, in turn, should help sales, they said.

Airlines still would buy the databases separately from ARC and IATA but could ask for it in the global format.

“The benefit is the carrier would be more inclined to buy data that is in a standardized format,” said Sheila Cuyjet, ARC’s acting general manager for data and analytical services.

There is plenty of potential for more co-operation between ARC and IATA because database sales are a growing source of business for both of them. ARC, for example, currently offers more than 40 data and analytical products.

Sabre tool combs
hotel Web prices
By Jeri Clausing

Sabre Travel Network is launching a service to help assure agents they are getting a hotel rate that their clients won’t be able to beat on the Internet.

The program, called Rate Assured, will monitor Web sites to see what rates individual hotels are offering, then certify in the GDS those hotels that stand by their promises to give agents the best deal.

The program will launch June 28, according to Stephen Fitzgerald, vice president of Sabre’s hotel and car distribution unit.

“One of the things we hear a lot from agents is that one of their fears is that when they book a room, the customer is going to call back and say they just found it on Expedia for $20 less,” Fitzgerald said.

Rate Assured goes beyond the rate programs offered by most GDS systems to monitor individual hotels and see if they are sticking to their promise to give agents rate parity, he said.

Part of problem, he said, is that many hotels are individually owned, and they sometimes make decisions to sell rooms on the Internet below prices the chains have guaranteed as a best rate for agents.