easyJet to compromise with third party sellers
Posted on: November 5th, 2007 by Dave Bess
Next year the European budget airline easyJet will introduce technology that will utilize third party travel agents to sell easyJet flights on their sights. This decision was taken in no small part due to the practice of what is known as screen scraping.
The process involves a third party taking information for easyJet’s website and reformatting on their own site. The practice stems from easyJet’’s reluctance to pay third party sites for referrals. Jerry Dunn, the company’s distribution development manager says, ‘We do not pay for referrals from third parties, because we believe they need us more than we need them.”
The 4th largest airline in Europe is trying to solve the problem by using selected, approved resellers to sell flights for easyJet. ‘We have developed an application programming interface (API), which is effectively a pipe from our host system which will engage with the third party distributors we want to use. However, it won’t be aimed at leisure third parties, but only to corporates,’ says Dunn.
www.easyjet.com