NBTA Promotes Corporate and Consumer Travel Choices at Hearing - Association urges DOT to protect travelers' access to purchasing channels
Alexandria, VA - The National Business Travel Association (NBTA) today urged the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Congress to immediately address whether travel distribution systems provide impartial and secure travel choices, as defined by the consumer and the corporation, not by the suppliers of travel services.
In submitted testimony to the National Commission to Ensure Consumer Information and Choice in the Airline Industry, NBTA explained how traditional travel distribution channels have been weakened by the major airlines' control over where various fares are published. This control has hampered consumer choice. NBTA called for the DOT to deal with the misleading information contained on the airlines' sites and sites like Orbitz.
"The current environment prevents consumers from looking at all available fares," NBTA President Kevin Iwamoto said today. "NBTA would like to communicate to Congress, the Department of Transportation, the airlines, travel agencies, and the global distribution systems (GDSs) what is truly at stake: Consumer Choice and Fair-fare play."
The DOT is charged with protecting consumers from deceptive airline practices. The DOT's travel distribution regulations were created assuming that the participating airlines work within a single system so that the potential airline consumer could determine the price, availability and fare rules on any given airline flight. These assumptions also carried informal guarantees that travel suppliers or intermediates, whether off or on-line, would provide impartiality in determining fare and travel options.
Currently, many of the web fares found on the airlines' sites and on websites like Orbitz are not found in the GDSs, the traditional method of reservation acceptable for corporations and travel agents. These fares are misleading to business and leisure travelers and make it impossible for companies to track employee travel and monitor adherence to corporate travel policies.
"This confusion increases corporations' distribution costs, misleads travelers, and wastes employee time and resources," explained Iwamoto. "We do not want to return to previous times when the means of distribution were controlled exclusively by the airlines and fare display and information biases were widespread. We understand that the airlines need to reduce their distribution costs, but it should not be at the expense of the consumer through the reduction or elimination of competition and choice. Our members want the DOT and Congress to protect consumers and corporations from these misleading practices."