CHICAGO — ATPCO said its new digital solution, Product Catalog, could open a world of selling options for leisure and corporate travel agencies.
The airline-owned company, which is the repository for traditional airline fare filings, used its Elevate conference here to sell airlines on the virtues of Product Catalog, which is in trial with several airlines and technology partners.
Under ATPCO’s vision, Product Catalog will be something of a large, open-sourced virtual library filled by airlines with all manner of seat and ancillary products, decoupled from their prices.
As a result, airlines accessing the catalog could respond to flight queries with an offer assembled and priced in real time and tailored precisely to what the shopper wants, even on multi-airline itineraries. The carrier won’t be confined to the constraints that come along with traditional filings that couple a product with a price.
And in ATPCO’s long-term vision for Product Catalog, even fare-bundle products will become unnecessary. Instead, a travel advisor could make a specific request — for the exact combination of seat product and ancillary items requested by a client — and get a tailored price.
Those responses could even include nontraditional ancillaries, such as limousine service to the airport or lodging — anything that airline has put into Product Catalog.
Alex Zoghlin
“I think it will dramatically unlock the number of things agencies can offer, and they can negotiate in corporate deals in ways that were very difficult in the filed-fare world,” ATPCO CEO Alex Zoghlin said.
Zoghlin compared the difference between the filed-fare pricing environment that remains primary today and the environment that ATPCO hopes will be facilitated by Product Catalog to the distinction between a prepared meal and a recipe book.
“Today, the meals are sold. Tomorrow, we’re offering ingredients, which means that travel agents can build their own meal,” he said.
To get started, ATPCO is utilizing the filed fare, rule and ancillary data it already receives from its approximately 450 member airlines to build standardized catalogs for those airlines. Carriers that have begun deploying NDC-enabled continuous pricing, ancillaries or dynamic bundling can also contribute additional catalog content.
For the foreseeable future, ATPCO envisions Product Catalog as a bridge between the alphabet-coded, filed-fare world centered around legacy airline technology and the digital merchandising world of NDC. Partner airlines in different stages of NDC advancement should be able to use the tool to piece together interline offers, for example.
Travel technology analyst Henry Harteveldt, founder of Atmosphere Research Group, said that developing Product Catalog is part of an effort by ATPCO to remain relevant in a future world in which published airline fare filings are supplanted by NDC-enabled dynamic and continuous fares.
But he also said the tool has merit.
“Having a product catalog that would allow an airline to dynamically create an offer based on things like presence of a corporate contract and loyalty status and that is sold through a third party could be very useful,” he said.
Product Catalog could also help standardize the NDC-enabled product data submitted to it by airlines, facilitating product deployment by third-party aggregators, including GDSs, Harteveldt said.
He said that though ATPCO is in a unique position to create an industrywide catalog, it still has competition. He said some airlines, among them United and American, already have their own product catalog, though it’s not clear how they are utilizing the catalog in concert with partners.
Airline retailing technology providers, including leading NDC developer Accelya, also have a catalog offering.
Speaking onstage at the Elevate conference, British Airways director of revenue management Karen Slinger, who is also an ATPCO board member, said BA is bullish about the potential utility of a centralized industry catalog. Aside from furthering airline merchandising, ATPCO also says the Product Catalog will facilitate easier settlement, especially on interline itineraries.
“I think it will be a key part of our future offer-and-order management,” Slinger said.
Zoghlin acknowledged that airlines could choose to eschew ATPCO’s industrywide catalog and instead build proprietary catalogs in conjunction with partners. But doing so would be costly and complex, given the large number of partners that many airlines have.
“Think about what that world looks like,” he said. “Our foundational view is we think transparency is important, and we think interoperability is important. We have not deviated from those perspectives. We have a board of directors of 10 airlines, and I have not heard any contrary view.”
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