The 3 Problems

It all started when…

One … Airfare Mark-ups

TMCs all use “mid-office systems” to create their quotes and manage their bookings. The problem is that these travel agency systems enable manual inputs into the quotation building process. That is, airfares can be marked up from the amount provided by the airline without the customer seeing it. The customer cannot see the original wholesale airfare’s amount. A typical mark-up to an international fare of several hundred dollars would far outweigh all other cost factors combined.

Until now, fare mark-ups have been under-discussed because they are practically undetectable. You cannot see them unless you also have the settlement data that shows the price paid by the TMC to the airline. Our proprietary HotDamn software decodes this data and makes it available as the irrefutable data-of-truth. Our sophisticated Airocheck audit process then checks for mark-ups across large data sets.

Two … Non-Availability

There is little point in using the size of your travel spend to negotiate discounted airfares and hotel rates if those discounts are then too often made unavailable. You have wasted your leverage. There are several causes of apparent unavailability of your negotiated fares and rates. Only one of them is actual unavoidable unavailability due to a lack of seats or rooms at the airline or hotel. The other causes should be checked for, addressed and prevented.

Are your travellers booking non-preferred suppliers? Are your hotels and airlines over-restricting through aggressive yield management? Might the TMC prioritise a different fare or rate that carries a commission, or a higher commission? Might the booking system or process actually be configured to prefer other suppliers to maximise commissions? Our Dealcheck audit tests your data for percentage availability by discounted fare and rate. We then analyse for causes so that they may be addressed.

Three … Fee Confusion

To mitigate their revenue risks, TMC have understandably unbundled their service fees into many fee types. A typical TMC arrangement can now have twenty or more types of fee. The problem is that with many bookings various fees can be applied manually and errors can occur. This works both ways. Our Feecheck audit checks for correct fee application using detailed booking data. We also check the quality and manageability of your fee arrangement. Fee complexity can often be reduced.

Warrants Attention

We do not suggest that the cost-increasing practices referred to are necessarily pervasive. But we do believe that they are common enough to warrant serious attention as a necessary part of good travel procurement.

For more information please contact audits@airocheck.com or +61 0409 944 911

Airocheck Audit Pty Ltd ACN 631 714 200