New Topaz Study Confirms Travelport e-Pricing(TM) Leads the Travel Industry in Finding the Lowest Available Airfares Worldwide
LANGLEY, England, March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Travelport GDS, one of the world's leading global distribution system (GDS) providers, today announced the findings of a new international benchmarking study conducted by Topaz International, a world leader in airfare auditing, showing that Travelport e-Pricing consistently finds the lowest available airfares worldwide. Topaz tracked the performance and itinerary pricing results of four of the most prominent low-fare shopping tools in the travel industry. Results revealed that e-Pricing not only finds lowest fares more often than other products, nearly 60 percent of the time overall, but also generates an average saving of $68.13 per ticket -- substantial savings for corporations and consumers, and the travel agencies, travel management companies (TMC) and Web sites that support them.
Conducted in December 2008, the study tapped the top 500 domestic and international city pairs across Asia Pacific, EMEA, North America and Latin America. This scope represents the largest range of itineraries studied by Topaz over the past year to produce GDS low-fare search benchmarking data. The study produced the following results:
Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available fare four times more often than the product powering the Amadeus GDS. Compared to Amadeus, e-Pricing finds the same or lower fare more than 78 percent of the time.
Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available fare twice as often as the low-fare search technology from ITA Software. Compared to ITA, e-Pricing finds the same or lower fare more than 70 percent of the time.
Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available fare twice as often as the tool offered by the Sabre GDS. Compared to Sabre, e-Pricing finds the same or lower fare more than 67 percent of the time.
In comparing the average ticket price returned by each of the competing tools, Travelport e-Pricing generates the highest average ticket price saving, realizing up to $111.51 in savings compared to Amadeus, $48.88 compared to ITA, and $44 compared to Sabre.
Overall, Travelport e-Pricing produces a $68.13 average consumer ticket price saving - or an average of 9.4 percent lower fares compared to competitive shopping products.
Overall results revealed that e-Pricing obtains lowest fares 297 times out of 500 city pairs, or 59.4 percent of the time, when compared to competing products.
"This is the latest and most accurate benchmarking data available on low-fare search technology, and it reflects the performance of Travelport e-Pricing, which was not tested in an outdated audit that is still being promoted by a competitor," said Armin Meier, chief commercial officer for Travelport GDS. "Just as important, the competitor's study tracked performance and pricing on 150 fewer city pairs than were used in our study, and the Travelport study also included many city pairs that originated outside of the United States. All of these criteria produced more substantial and reliable results, clearly confirming that e-Pricing is the global market leader in low-fare shopping technology."
As part of Travelport's goal to deliver its most innovative technologies and buying strengths to every customer, the low-fare shopping power of e-Pricing is being introduced to subscribers of Travelport's Galileo and Apollo GDSs globally during 2009. Major online retailers, airlines of all sizes and Worldspan-connected travel agencies have enjoyed e-Pricing advantages for years. Introduction of the technology to Galileo and Apollo subscribers is being made possible by the integration of innovative Worldspan fare shopping technology worldwide.
Travelport e-Pricing can return up to 350 unique available fares in a single search to give travel buyers the broadest range of choices. It employs an exclusive fare caching technology that minimizes hits on airline reservations systems while maximizing fare data integrity and distribution performance for airlines worldwide in today's dynamic travel shopping environment.
Using independent auditors, Topaz requested and priced trips, and tracked the performance of competing solutions using the following criteria: The study used the top 500 domestic and international city pairs, which were selected based on the most frequently booked city pairs globally, and many of which originate outside of North America. The study was conducted using a U.S. point of sale on all itinerary requests. The travel date was defined using a seven-day advance purchase, and a three- to five-day minimum stay, and flights were requested to depart at 9:00 a.m. and return at 5:00 p.m. Topaz used comparable shopping entries for each competing solution to ensure like-for-like comparison, with all system defaults applied. All search engines were queried for published fares, and were simultaneously queried for each itinerary request. Lowest fares returned were recorded for comparison.
To distinguish true differences in performance and pricing capabilities in a like-for-like comparison, data with the potential to disproportionately skew results in favor of one GDS over another were excluded. To this end, while the content of low-fare carrier Southwest Airlines is available and bookable through Travelport, all GDSs do not distribute Southwest content. Therefore, in the study, the instances in which Southwest returned the lowest-priced itinerary were disregarded, with the next highest non-Southwest itinerary used for comparison.
About Travelport
Travelport is one of the world's largest travel conglomerates, offering broad-based business services to companies operating in the global travel industry. The company is comprised of the global distribution system (GDS) business that includes the Worldspan and Galileo brands; GTA, a leading global, multi-channel provider of hotel and ground services; IT Services and Software, which hosts mission critical applications and provides business and data analysis solutions for major airlines. With 2008 revenues of $2.5 billion, Travelport operates in approximately 160 countries and has over 5,500 employees.
Travelport also owns approximately 48% of Orbitz Worldwide (NYSE: OWW), a leading global online travel company.
Travelport is a private company owned by The Blackstone Group, One Equity Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and Travelport management.
About Topaz International
With 30 years of experience in analyzing travel-related expenditures, Topaz International is a world leader in airfare and hotel auditing, providing benchmark information and consultancy services to improve the delivery of corporate travel services. Supporting travel managers, travel buyers and travel agencies, Topaz helps improve performance and facilitate cost savings.
