Travel reservations review put on fast track

Date: 20/06/1996

By Chris Johnstone

AIRLINE passengers will be given a better deal at travel agents if the European Commission gets its way in the wake of a wide-ranging review of how tickets are booked through computerised reservation systems (CRSs).

The ongoing review, which has been put on a fast track by officials, seeks to bolster customer rights within the Commission's CRS code of conduct.

But officials in DGVII, the Directorate-General for transport, are also considering changes to take account of new, do-it-yourself booking on the Internet and other cyberspace modes.

The second - and final - round of consultations with airlines, travel agents, and CRS heavyweights such as Galileo, Sabre, and Amadeus will take place at the end of this month. With CRSs currently used for about 80&percent; of airline bookings, the knock-on effects of any changes will hit every high street.

The most striking suggestion is for passengers to be given their own screen in travel agencies, enabling them to see what choices they have as the travel agent consults the CRS. A print-out of all flight information called up for the passenger is the Commission's fall-back position.

Travel agents, described by the Commission as the missing link in its current code, will also be subjected to a battery of new demands.

This would enable the Commission, for the first time, to investigate complaints against them properly.

Travel agents would have to provide customers with full details of all stopovers, changes of plane, and the name of the airline operating the flight. The latter is not always clear from the multiplying codeshare deals between airlines.

Making travel agents spell out the best bargains to passengers, instead of opting for the most expensive flight to earn the best commission, is also aimed at speeding up the slow fall in European airfares and boosting airline competition.

Suggested changes to the existing code would also clamp down on multiple bookings by travel agents. Airlines, which are billed for every CRS booking, have accused travel agents of bleeding them dry by making bogus bookings to inflate agents' commissions from the reservation companies.

Officials also want to boost competition between airlines and railways in Europe by laying down guidelines for high-speed train services to appear as alternatives to flights on the same reservation systems.

At the moment, a would-be traveller is hard-pressed to compare the advantages of the rival modes because they appear on different booking systems. Now, the Commission is suggesting that competing rail services be allowed on the same screen as flights, without the red tape of creating a new CRS code for railways.

Looking to the future, the Commission appears prepared to carry out more drastic surgery on its special code. With European airlines rapidly catching on to the US rage for online Internet booking, the big CRS companies are seeing their market dominance eroded.

Transport officials are thus considering whether large chunks of the CRS code aimed at dealing with that dominance should be dropped in favour of letting the ordinary competition rules take over.

Officials are, however, clear that they do not want a raft of new rules to police direct online booking in its present form.

European pioneers of online ticketing, such as Lufthansa and British Midland, are currently only offering passengers the opportunity to check routes, prices and seat availability, and make bookings with their own airlines. Officials say competition problems would quickly start to surface if they started detailing or comparing what other airlines were doing.