Travelport targets Low Cost Carriers

Travelport is targeting the region’s low cost carriers (LCC) to sign up for its GDS system, according to its vice-president for the Middle East region Rabih Saab.

Travelport recently announced that it had signed up Jazeera Airways on to its Galileo system and according to Saab, the plan is now to get other Middle Eastern low cost carriers on board.

“Low cost carriers are very important in this side of the world. In terms of traffic they are taking an ever larger share of the pie – they are growing the pie as well as taking an ever larger share of the pie,” he said.

He explained that while the original model of LCCs had been to keep their costs low, which meant selling directly to consumers through their websites, and avoiding travel agents - as the carriers expanded and looked to target more business travellers they would naturally need to tie up with a GDS booking system.

“In business very few people book their own travel – they usually go through a travel management company because there is a high spend and the company needs to know where their employees are. So as the LCCs go from a strategy of only focusing on leisure travellers to having to fill more seats with business people, then they start looking at the GDS as a way of reaching them. These people are using travel agents to book their travel, and if you look at Jazeera for example, they even have a business class section – Jazeera Plus.”

Saab said he was confident that it was only a matter of time before all the local low cost carriers were signed up to the GDS system. “We are working on all the LCCs. I think it’s fair to say all of them in this part of the world are interested in GDS. The only carrier which has always said no to GDS is Ryan Air, they have always been adamant not to evolve in that sense.”