EasyJet’s Rail Deal Highlights New Airline Sector Way of Selling Trains and Flights – Skift

EasyJet and Deutsche Bahn began selling in late July combination tickets that include flights and rail travel, Skift has learned. The deal is notable for a behind-the-scenes aspect. Europe’s second-biggest discount airline is using a new method to sell the tickets from the German railway operator, and other carriers are also embracing this method to sell rail or long-haul flights from other providers.

“It’s going to send shockwaves in the industry because rail is finally sexy,” said Ann Cederhall of LeapShift, a UK-based travel brand retailing consultancy.

Airlines are paying renewed attention to rail partnerships after the French government required cuts to domestic flights in exchange for billions in state aid during the pandemic and Germany is looking at parallel steps in demanding minimum flight prices to discourage cheap short-haul flights. The countries want to encourage train travel, which is believed to generate fewer carbon emissions.

EasyJet’s move uses partnerships involving application programming interfaces, or APIs, or data feeds that rail and airline partners can plug into, rather than use older, hard-coded systems or pass through third-party middlemen tech vendors. Software engineers have long relied on APIs in sectors such as advertising and financial technology. But airlines have been slower to adopt robust, modern versions of this data-sharing tool to sell airfares, rail, and other content from partners.

To be sure, more traditional methods still work and can be more seamless in some ways. German airline Lufthansa and Deutsche Bahn are expanding a formal alliance where their computer systems are synced to enable long-distance flight passengers to seamlessly connect to select intercity train routes at its Frankfurt hub. Lufthansa Express Rail lets passengers need only one connecting ticket, with automatically rebooking in the event of delays.

But the premise is based on older and more rigid technology. Lufthansa Group’s Rail&Fly product, for example, makes it possible for travel agents to combine rail and flights in a single booking powered by used technology from Montreal-based vendor AccesRail in conjunction with reservation systems run by the global distribution systems Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport.

“The benefit of an API partnership primarily cost because it can be expensive to work with the old methods, such as the charges a clearinghouse may charge for traditional interline, and the delays in technological implementation that can pop up,” Cederhall said. “With an API partnership, it’s just you and the partner splitting the money. No waiting for settlement three months from now. And you can spin it up in a few weeks to see if there’s demand, making it easier to experiment and test where customer demand truly is.”

EasyJet’s Deutsche Bahn deal is the next step in a project begun in 2017 to allow passengers to connect with flights operated by other carriers. Currently, 16 carriers take part in the Worldwide by EasyJet offer, including Cathay Pacific, China Airlines, Emirates, Etihad, Singapore Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic. The connections at London’s Gatwick airport are typically available only for itineraries where there’s a minimum 160-minute connection time because EasyJet won’t hold flights if a passenger’s first leg of a trip is late.

Other airlines are attempting to mimic the effort, selling flights and rail together using a new-ish method.

Seven other carriers join EasyJet in using Icelandic startup Dohop to handle their virtual interlining as “host” carriers.

“We’ll soon be up to around 14 airlines hosting sales of other airlines’ flights once we have launched all of those that are in play,” said David Gunnarsson, CEO of Dohop.

Earlier this year, Air France went live as a host offering combination tickets with carriers it doesn’t have formal interline or codeshare arrangements with via Google price-comparison search.

Vueling, a low-cost brand that’s part of International Airlines Group and especially present in the panish domestic market, is a customer. Some carriers, such as Avianca, Eurowings, and Transavia, have widely promoted their virtual interlining offering in some markets but not in others.

In the typical deal, the startup helps the airline sell the combination tickets on their own site and app, takes care of the distribution through metasearch such as Google Flights, and has a customer service team that handles consumer queries when travel problems arise.

“Widespread consumer adoption is not something that’s going to happen overnight,” said Gunnarsson. “There are still many factors that have to fall into place, including consumer education. But we really see the trend taking off over the next several years.”

Some airline executive continue to find so-called “virtual interlining,” or the use of APIs for selling, to be confusing. Some mistake it for cross-selling, code share, or a joint venture, yet the “host” airline that markets the combination ticket doesn’t assume responsibility for the other airline’s service delivery as would be the case in traditional commercial partnerships. Servicing in case of flight delays or cancellations are handled by a technology facilitator, such as Airsiders, Dohop, Etraveli’s TripStack product, or Kiwi.com‘s business-to-business deals where carriers agree to take part in the bundling. Airlines simply focus instead on selling another product.

More controversially, some online travel agencies bundle together flights for sale without the permission of carriers. These include Skiplagged, which has recently been caught up in litigation, as Skift has reported over its “hidden city” tactics that are a separate maneuver, and Kiwi.com’s online travel agency business, which some airlines have attempted to block commercially, Etraveli’s online travel reseller brands, and the Liligo.com metasearch brand of Edreams Odigeo. More than 70 million passengers worldwide self-connected by creating itineraries by buying tickets on airlines that didn’t have formal commercial relationships, according to research from consultancy firm ICF.

In the meantime, other airlines besides EasyJet are likely to explore similar deals with railway operators as they attempt to cope with complaints about the carbon intensiveness of their operations while also seeking additional revenue sources as they emerge from the pandemic.

“I’ve always said that if you’re a long-haul airline, you really should consider expanding your uptake area at your hub airport,” Cederhall said. “If you have operations in a city like Amsterdam, why not tap into the onward connections railways provide out of Amsterdam by selling combination tickets?”

See full article