The story behind Bezurk-Amadeus deal

In what is seen as the first of collaboration between a meta-search and a GDS, Bezurk.com have reached an agreement with Amadeus which will see it using the Amadeus’ web services product known as Meta-Pricer.

According to Bezurk’s CEO, Martin Symes, who was interviewed in BOOT, the Business of Online Travel blog, the key benefit of the deal is that it will help Bezurk will help Bezurk improve its supplier proposition, that is, offer airlines a no-cost solution.

Explains Symes in BOOT: “The airlines we work with have a wide variety of approaches to getting their fares on to their websites. Some connect straight to their host systems from their internet booking engine (IBE). Some have a cache sitting between their host and the IBE. Some use the host of one of the GDS’s. Many use a third party IBE which accesses their own host. Each of these arrangements has its own technical constraints and economics associated with giving third parties access to the data on any sort of scale.

“Many carriers that embraced search engine marketing some time ago offer travel search engines access to API’s, which typically query a cache populated predominantly by natural search traffic. Unfortunately many carriers don’t yet offer these direct API’s, although some have plans to do so. In some cases, we have been asked to provide advice on the design of these.

“This has meant that screenscraping has been the next best means of us getting access to airline data. Screenscraping works perfectly fine for many airlines which have a system with sufficient capacity, are fast enough, can control and track access, have a layout that doesn’t require multiple page requests per query and who aren’t getting billed per query by a third party company running their IBE or host for them.

“So for reasons both technical and economic, screenscraping is not always a viable means of us getting the data we need. In these situations Amadeus MetaPricer is a good solution because there is no cost to the carriers or extra load placed on their websites because we are querying fares and availability via the Amadeus system. The only thing the carrier needs to do is distribute their fares to our Amadeus Office Id’s for each point of sale.”

Symes said that Bezurk would “continue to maintain direct connectivity with non-GDS airlines; many of which are able to provide access to their inventory through API’s or via screenscraping their public websites, where they have given us permission to do so”.

Sharing his observations on the deal, Tim Hughes, the editor of BOOT, wrote: “It does raise some interesting questions about the ability of supplier and OTA sites/systems to support the pounding that meta-search companies threaten to deliver and of the GDS’ companies continued efforts to re-invent themselves as technology companies.

“I get the product reason behind Bezurk’s decision here as they need to continue to improve the product delivery to their inventory providers. (It) is further proof that the meta-search model is still in development and I hope that this deal helps Bezurk continue to grow its product range.”