Leisure business must come direct, says easyJet
Easyjet has no plans to jump into bed with the big online travel agents to sell to the leisure sector, its distribution development manager Jerry Dunn told delegates at a London conference yesterday.
The low-cost carrier made headlines earlier this year when it began selling through the GDSs in a bid to capture more of the lucrative business sector.
It charges €7.50 for each sector booked, €6 each if two sectors are booked and €5 per sector if three or more are booked.
The charges are being resisted by many travel management companies who say they cannot justify passing the charges on to clients and are therefore having to pay it themselves.
Dunn told delegates at the Eye For Travel Travel Distribution Summit: “The reason we are going through the GDSs and establishing relationships with other parties is to get access to the corporate market.
“We have been successful over the years with leisure, spending a lot of time with advertising to drive customers to our website. We are in competition with online travel agents and we want people to come to us so we can sell ancillary products too.”
Dunn went on to rail against sites that screen scraped Easyjet’s, telling the conference: “Screen scraping is technologically bad. It causes customer service issues and means our product is not sold in the right way. It means you get people turning up to check in and they have been sold to incorrectly and we are left holding the baby.
“We don’t allow screen scraping, but it’s not an insignificant part of our business so we are trying to not just have a hard stick approach but also to offer an alternative – an API which we use to distribute through the GDS.”
By Dinah Hatch
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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