SkyLink has made some significant enhancements to their B2B booking engine which should help travel agents have more important info at their finger tips when providing air fares and routing choices to their clients. The consolidator feels agents should now have a technological edge on 3 main issues they face during the sales process:
- Competition from other agents
- Competition from mega portals
- Competition from airlines selling direct
Changes to their B2B booking engine are based on based on Sabre’s latest technology and Sabre is very impressed with it - they have presented SkyLink with an award for the adaptations they have applied to the process.
SkyLink’s enhanced booking engine has the ability to make agents look smart to their customer. It covers all routing possibilities, r/t, o/w, o/j, multi city and stopovers. It not only displays all fare types, but also indicates if they are available or not. So, the agent will be aware of what the lowest possible fare could have been – even if it is not currently available. Valuable info for the sales discussion as opposed to just throwing out a single price.
The new edition also auto checks possibilities for routings departing 3 days earlier and returning 3 days following the selected flight search. This enhancement makes SkyLink the only engine providing such a service for international routings. Expedia does provide a similar option for domestic flights only.
The new SkyLink display also indicates fare types and whether quotes are net based or not so that agents will be able to determine mark up possibilities.
SkyLink has poured millions of dollars into their booking engine development and such a breadth of search results obviously incurs costs for them. In order to defray hard costs, SkyLink’s new booking engine is available to agents on a subscription basis – at $100 per month or based on a commitment for specified business. During the launch period, the 1st month’s fee will be donated to SkyLink’s Childrens’ Charities.
Another opportunity SkyLink provides for agents with international business is net fare displays based on the international consolidator’s 80 airline agreements, not only in Canada, but in the U.S., U.K. and several other regions. Those net fare agreements are also considered in any fare calculations. This also provides the opportunity to compare routings available from border cities like YYZ compared to BUF – one example of a comparative fare search to JNB showed a routing from BUF with one good cnx in WAS at over $400 less than the best available fare with a less attractive cnx and airline combo originating in YYZ.
