In 2005, the two largest Brazilian carriers, TAM and GOL, pulled all their domestic content out of the GDSs, removing more than 90 percent of the country’s total domestic inventory. In lieu of the traditional GDS model, TAM and GOL required that bookings at the Brazilian point of sale be made through their direct channels, including their Web sites.

Faced with massive losses of content and decreased incentives and commissionable bookings, travel management companies and other third parties developed their own single-entry aggregated content portals for efficient one-stop shopping. Meanwhile, the TMC’s are forced to face this GDS pull out , resulting in increased agent processing times and in turn transaction fees. A reservation with domestic portion would previously take 2.5 minutes to complete, but now averages nine minutes.

The lack of access to airline content through a centralized system has stunted corporate online booking tool growth in Brazil , which has settled at around 10 percent.

• Average online booking tool usage in Latin America does not reach 6%, compared to North America’s almost 50%.
• Corporation are reluctant to adopt an online booking tool due to the lack of content or local constraints. Nevertheless, those corporations with online booking tool claim an average adoption of 60%

Relevant actions will reshape the travel market in 2010 since TAM and Gol will finally show full content in the GDSs, apparently as early as 1st quarter 2010.

Enhanced visibility of fares and inventory is about to be a reality after many years of limited access and frustrated travel agencies!

But let’s see some figures that show the real scale of this scenario. Ricardo Bichara, Online Booking & ID Manager, Latin America at Carlson Wagonlit Travel, has shared a revision of the total sales (international and domestic) of the six biggest markets in Latin America (Source: Carlson Wagonlit Travel , June’09).

The tables below show not only the percentage of transactions performed thru the GDS but also the sales amount corresponding to that transaction percentage ,e.g. in the case of Brazil 91% of airline transactions are performed outside the GDS but the 9% done thru the GDS corresponds to 37% of the sales amount, or in other words, the average ticket price of all GDS transactions is clearly higher than the average ticket price outside the GDS.

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