Sounds too good to be true? Well, it’s considered the holy grail of air fare search and no one’s really cracked it up to now, especially in Europe and, to a greater extent, Asia with its lack of transparency.
But one company believes it may have broken the code. UK-based start-up, Everbread, has been working on its Haystack search solution since 2009 and is now rolling it out in selected markets in Europe and Asia.
Explaining how Haystack works, co-founder Assen Vassilev (left) said that Haystack does not force the consumer to buy an entire trip on a single ticket. “That allows us to combine low cost airlines with regular airlines,” he said in an interview with Supply Chain Digital.
This plays into the growing trend of low cost airlines collaborating with full service airlines to feed off each other’s networks – for instance, the recent interline agreement signed between Air France KLM and the Jetstar Group.
By integrating low cost airlines into a single environment with full service airlines, Vassilev believes this will allow low cost airlines to be used as “feeder” airlines to the long-haul flights. “By virtue of producing a cheaper airline ticket, you’ll get more customers on both planes,” he said.
Haystack also believes that by producing more relevant results faster and offering split ticketing in one environment, it will take the costs out of search for everyone, including OTAs and GDS.
“Search is expensive for OTAs and even for the GDS. With an ever increasing look-to-book ratio, search could become a significant cost centre.” said Filip Filipov, Manager Strategy and Business Development.
While the focus now is on travel agents, OTAs and meta-searches, Filipov said that “as time goes by, we will find different ways to work with a GDS”.
“We are not really taking away anything, as the revenue lies in the booking part of the business. We don’t do the booking, we do the search.”
However Timothy O’Neil Dunne, chief technology officer of LUTE, the alternative distribution system which unveiled its Version 2.0 at ITB Berlin in March (story here), believes GDSs will not welcome a player such as Everbread and its search engine Haystack.
“I think that this would be perceived as very threatening to a GDS and anyone who is tied to the legacy GDS model. Others will welcome this.”
O’ Neil Dunne said that what Haystack offered, over and above others, is a “holistic approach to the whole notion of what a customer wants”.
“This is important as it recognizes that content is fragmented (ie multiple sources) with differing degrees of quality. As a result, the search can then aggregate content which previously was the exclusive remit of the closed legacy GDSs so the user gets a better quality of search results including non-GDS content such as low cost carriers combined into a single environment.”
Filipov said the company was eyeing Asia for customers given the growth potential of the region. “We know it’s a tough market. There are so many low cost airlines and different data sources. But we believe we can offer real value in pulling everything together and allow travel agents to access all the options they need in one search.”
O’Neil Dunne said that although Europe has a mature secondary channel for fares that Asia lacks, both are similar “in that there are many low cost carriers who comprise a large chunk of non-homogenous distribution (ie GDS). Ditto South America.”
Noted Vassilev, who will be speaking at the Web In Travel Conference in October, “I see us as being a fresh and open minded technology partner to the airline community that will move away from a lot of the infrastructure that has been in place since the 1950s and 1960s.
“Right now, the industry has a tendency to lock customers down and I think that is an approach that really stifles innovation.”
Featured image credit (airplane): Ockra/iStock
