Some history on the significant date: http://bit.ly/cED2Uo

For some bad luck, for other good. Check it out.

Delta Offers Bookings Through Facebook
The first airline to offer an integrated booking capability through Facebook is Delta Airlines, which recently revamped the home page of their website. The booking will be done through a Facebook App (you have to share your information with the airline, as well as that of your friends) and is powered by Alvenda, a social commerce channel creator. Delta makes the inroad in social networking, despite previous headway done by easyJet in that field.
The feature on the Delta fan page is restricted to US consumers currently, but most likely it will be upgraded to Europe and Asia soon. So the fight is on – after mobile device apps, now airlines will be moving more and more into the social space, allowing users to search their fares, but at the same time getting all their information in return for some good customer analysis.
Announcement: http://bit.ly/dBw2NQ

Travelport Issues $250 Million Private Offering of Senior Notes
Travelport announced yesterday that they are starting a private offering of $250 million of senior notes due 2016. The press release is quite terse, but the purpose of the issuance is to cover previous debt, with the rest focused on corporate purposes, “which may include repayment of indebtedness or business development requirements.” Quite an intriguing spin for a company that is expected to do an IPO before the end of the year.
To add more to it, it comes right after the Q2 results, which, despite the negligent profit for the giant of $22 million, showed some positive trends. Surely, the indebtedness will be overshadowed by the business development requirements and that could include improvements on quite a bit of fronts, whether they are on the ePricing search solution or the booking handling.
In Tport’s own words: http://bit.ly/b7xeDS

Industry Notables
Sabre and Cisco partner to offer better view over telepresence locations. http://bit.ly/9Itaej

MakeMyTrip hits $14 a share on an IPO, valuing the company at $478 million. http://bit.ly/aqK2PI

Expedia teams up with Yahoo!, shows fares on six Yahoo! website, including the UK. http://bit.ly/bdsPDX

Spanish rising Low Cost Star, Vueling, to add 6 more planes by 2011. http://bit.ly/cpXYCE

Air Astana posts a record Q1 Financial year pre-tax profit of $33.5 million. http://bit.ly/bsLleC

Copa Holdings hits $18.6 in Q2 2010, down 66% YoY. http://bit.ly/cDlsg2

Air Asia capture a world record by selling 538,000 seats in just one day, priced at $0.31. http://bit.ly/axPZNb

Qantas, the OneWorld Australian partner, posts $104 m in net profit, down from last year by 7.5% for the same Q2 period, but CEO says conditions improving. http://bit.ly/c7TsFf

Good show! Air Canada is expected to send ill boy Tanner Brown. Last Wednesday Tanner Bawn’s customized wheelchair was accidentally damaged by the airline and Air Canada has decided to fly the kid to Disney to make up for the bad experience. Now that’s good thinking!

Have a Laugh
Southwest allows FLA children to buy tickets at the counter at JAX and fly to Nashville, without even ID-ing. Wow! http://bit.ly/d0Uti2

Good show! Everbread is now an allied member of the Open AXIS Group: http://bit.ly/bBNlRY

Haiku Style, as we have an upcoming call…

Industry Notables
Tnooz partners with AgentStream, Sabre’s online community for travel agents, to push news and allow discussions. http://bit.ly/d26eSC

TravelSky, the Chinese Distribution System, extends contract with Unysis, adding mainframes to support growing demand in travel in China. http://bit.ly/adh1JB

Mexicana needs $100 m to keep flying. http://bit.ly/cTUPUp

Africa pax numbers are growing, says IATA. http://bit.ly/bkdiBy

SAS CEO, Matts Janson, expected to step down. http://bit.ly/9s8ELT

Continental CEO, Mr. Smisek, urges DOT to upgrade air traffic control systems and procedures. http://bit.ly/b9gnq7

Virgin Atlantic is expanding FFP to include other Virgin brands in travel. http://bit.ly/c4cmaN
– A nice interview with Sir Richard on AA, Virgin Atlantic and the Virgin Empire. http://bit.ly/9Gu1sz

Have a Laugh
Germany v. France. Pillow fight on a plane. Courtesy of Mr. Milenkov. http://bit.ly/bwZ4As

jetBlue’s flight attendant, a hero or a villain, provokes some thinking on flight attendant incident. Wired posts a round-up of interesting stories. Check out the one where allegedly drunk Russian flight attendants give a black eye to a passenger. Great! http://bit.ly/cllOpm

Aer Lingus Seeks Partnership with Star Alliance Spanair
Aer Lingus has stirred yet another wave of airline network speculations – the Irish carrier has applied to DOT for approval on a code-share agreement with Spanair, a member of Star Alliance. The deal will allow code-sharing on trans-Atlantic flights and comes amidst a flurry of such agreements among the big guys, more along the lines of alliance membership. After CO/UA, BA/AA/AB, and AF/KL/DL/AZ, now Aer Lingus is trying to get through DOT’s approval mechanism to start flying the Atlantic on a code-share. Aer Lingus already has an agreement with United, another Star Alliance member, and the current move puts it in a position of close ties with Star Alliance. Let’s not forget that currently Aer Lingus does not belong to any Alliance, after leaving OneWorld in 2006. Given that the airline hinted at exploring alliance options, that could be a good harbinger of where Ryanair’s archrival will go.
Article: http://bit.ly/bLuwlm

Rearden Commerce on the Rise
Rearden Commerce, the personal assistant company that has built a platform to connect buyers to sellers, has been busy this summer. After a number of announcements (working closely with Tport), now Rearden has closed a deal with SouthWest Airline to integrate their inventory in the Rearden Platform. More over, it just partnered with Carlson Wagonlit to deploy its solution to the CWT desktops. That’s a company to watch in travel and travel management.
On SouthWest: http://bit.ly/aLQzvu
On CWT through Tnooz: http://bit.ly/dDx8NQ

Industry Notables
Air Arabia posts $14 million profit for Q2, a 44% decline YoY. http://bit.ly/cEG5h6

One of Alex Staun’s favorite airlines, SAS,  was the most punctual airline in Europe in July. http://bit.ly/c1MIwo

Nice Op-Ed on why US Airways might need to go another alliance, now having the status of a “junior partner” in Star, even though they joined in 2006. http://bit.ly/aFFO9U

The US to install a $14 levy on people entering the states on the Visa Waiver program. http://bit.ly/bL3OoO

Momondo.com wins the Sunday Times’ Best Overall Flight search. http://bit.ly/b10wsv

Amadeus has a positive look on LCCs and their integration into the GDS. http://bit.ly/bjTse6

800 agents globally already upgraded their systems to Sabre Red, seem to be happy with the new product. http://bit.ly/bBPAnj

OAG continues partnership with China’s Distribution System TravelSky. http://bit.ly/bGcSvv

Travelocity rolls out a product to manage ancillary fees for corporate clients. http://bit.ly/cP2NcR

Virgin Atlantic starts a first-ever global ad campaign for upper class. http://bit.ly/cGGADp

Have a Laugh
We’ve all had bad days at work at some point and it is perfectly understandable. But a flight attendant from jetBlue takes it one step further. He got upset, because a passenger didn’t follow his instructions (read the background), cursed the pax on the plane and exited through the slide. Nice!!! http://bit.ly/cM1LP6

GDS Moves
On Thursday, Travelport released it’s Q2 results, showing a revenue of $598 m on a net income of $22 m. Segments are showing an increase YoY, with APAC up by 18%. At the release, Tport also announced that it is releasing its e-Pricing 4 with enhanced search features.

The search product is doing 75 million searches a day throughout the portfolio and Tport’s management is expecting to see that number increase with the upgraded solution. No word on an IPO, even though even analysts noticed that the presentation and materials were one notch up from what they have seen before.

In the meantime, Amadeus upgraded its own MasterPrice and showed new configurations that will use a 5% fare-based search. The news got quite a bit of limelight in the week (and a nice timing, just before Tport ), but there have not been any comments yet as to how it measures up. What we know, however, is that the new MP comes with a premium – agents, currently using the search by Amadeus will need to pay more in the future.

A side note for those of you interested: the MP has some unexpected downtime in a number of locations over the last few weeks (in one point in time, AMA search was shut down for roughly 5 hours).

OTAs Doing Well
After Expedia the week before, Priceline and Orbitz announced solid quarters. $115 m in net income for Priceline, $9.7 m for Orbitz. So only Travelocity is left out (they don’t announce their results), but we can expect them to be doing as well and while the number is not known, it should be in the black for Q2.

A couple of interesting points here: more and more execs are voicing their opinions on Google + ITA: still all of them being careful, but saying that the offering (whatever it will be), will be a competitive force in the future.

Some of the reasons the Big 4 are not too concerned are:

a) most of them have a back-up pricing solution (Expedia is known to have developed their Best Fares Search (based on Tport and Sabre search) and 48% of Orbitz is owned by Tport (we can see a relatively straightforward move to ePricing if things go sour). Travelocity, as we all know, uses Sabre’s search solution.

b) As we have seen from the reports, each one of the Big 4 is more focused on hotels and airline tickets are not necessarily a decisive profit-generating unit.

Meta-Search Engines: The Fight is On
A lot of movement on this side as well. SkyScanner posted a solid quarter, claiming $4.5 million in revenue. The scraping site is doing quite well based on its diversified product (well, that’s a misnomer): product that exists in different locations and supports different languages (with the relevant domains, of course). It seems that this will be the long-term trend, where we will see global MSEs doing global marketing: Fly.com released their German product (Fly.com/de – fly.de was already taken), Zugu announced their US site, and Momondo is already moving strong in smoke-covered Russia.

At the same time, industry outlets are focusing on Kayak exclusively. The MA company is apparently testing with all available solutions for pricing to ensure differentiation and prepare for the battle of the decade on B2C flight search with Google.

One thing to watch here: Fly.com. The Travelzoo owned meta gathered quite a bit of momentum and has been stealing some meta users from Kayak and Skyscanner. It even tried showing some opaque pricing for airlines (think a half-baked priceline approach) and overall, the growth of the company has been impressive. However, as we just said, the domain name real estate is the new exploding market (The domain Fly.com was purchased for $1.7 million) and a differentiation of the product will not necessarily mean a straight forward substitute of the .com to the .de or the .in – other players own the domains. So, It might be a bit tough for the Tzoo company in the very near future. (ITA powers Fly.com).

Analyst to Jeff Clarke: “Why all of a sudden the nice presentations?”

I didn’t get it right yesterday, when I mentioned that a pending IPO could be announced during Tport’s Q2 results call. Nevertheless, the call was quite interesting, giving us some insight of how the GDS sees the world of travel and performs in it.

Results:

- Revenue: $598 million (1% increase YoY)
- Operating Income: $95 million (17% decrease)
- EBITDA: $176 million (2% decline YoY)
- 89.9 million segments processed (5% increase YoY)
- Segments (Americas + 3%, Europe +4%, Asia-Pacific +18%)
- Revenue: $22 million (down from 39 million YoY)
Jeff Clarke commented on the stronger growth in Asia especially on the Hotel side. He also mentioned the Tport is releasing an updated version 4 of ePricing and the GDS is doing 75 million searches a day. He sees ITA as a head-to-head competitor in that regard, but focused on the additional services that the GDS provides on top of fares and pricing. Travelport also mentioned a commitment to hardware upgrades.

What grabbed my attention was the blunt question from one of the analysts (see title of the piece): “Why all of a sudden the nice presentation?”. The answer, or at least the non-humorous part of it, was something along the lines that Tport is upping their relationship with shareholders and analysts and that the previous presentations were 1990s style and he wanted to move more into the 2000s. It beats me why not 2010s.
Check out the results on the official page: http://bit.ly/dj5LJQ
Orbitz in the Black, Not As Good As Expedia and Priceline
Orbitz, the partly owned Tport OTA property (48%), announced its Q2 results yesterday as well. Some numbers for the geek inside you:
- Gross Bookings: $3.08 Billion
- Net Revenue: $193.5 million
- Net Income: $9.7 million (5% decrease YoY)
Overall, not a bad performance, given that toward the end of 2009 Orbitz was losing cash and required a $50 million investment by Tport, but now all seems good.
Short coverage on the investor’s site: http://bit.ly/bmK7vq

Industry Notables
WestJet announces $20.6 million profit for Q2, which turns out to be Consecutive Profitable Quarter No. 21. http://bit.ly/94i11T

Air Canada, the other major player in that market, posted a loss of $198.7 million for the same period. http://bit.ly/bfAmRP

Mexicana stops selling tickets, it could be time to re-book on another airline, argues The Global Traveller. http://bit.ly/9a3gyy

Fraport urges Air Berlin to concentrate on FRA as a follow-up to its announcement to join OneWorld. AB management sees a promising prospect to do so, especially when runway No. 4 is completed. http://bit.ly/agPdYb

Delta will see a $1.2 Billion re-make of Terminal 3 at JFK (according to this piece, DL carries nearly 25% of the 45 m pax going through the airport), expanding the gates by 9 and demolishing T4.

Etihad re-makes 10 A320 from 120 Economy – 20 Business to 162 Economy-only planes. Traditional going LCC on short-haul. The trend continues. http://bit.ly/d61c29

Amadeus Upgrades MP
Mr. Schaal from Tnooz does a wonderful round-up of the release of the new search product by Amadeus.

The upgrade allegedly handles increasing LTB, focusing 5% of its queries on Fare-Based search. According to Tnooz, the new product will allow users to have more freedom in flexibility in search parameters, even though the set will be still constraint.

Additionally, the new system will be available as an upgrade to the current product, so OTAs and TAs should be ready to pay more (at the same time, Amadeus is trying to ensure that the search cost will not explode).

Article (including PDF): http://bit.ly/aGmuoS

Travelport Drums Up Attention
Tport announced a number of good deals in the last few days: United Airlines extension till 2013 and Sputnik roll-out in Russia. Now one-by-one.

United: Tport extended its full-content agreement and now agencies using Apollo, Galileo, and Wspan will be selling UA tickets and seat inventory, with an option to upsell (this is big!).

So now, agents using the Tport desktop, will be able to sell certain ancillaries. The deal follows a Continental full-content agreement, which coincidentally, ends in 2013 (no wonder here, CO and UA are filing with the SEC some additional documents for the merger).
Sputnik – the Russian retail reseller agency, signed a deal with Travelport and all 350 offices in Russia and CIS.

That is crucial for a market that is not yet tapped by the GDSs in a major way, since the local system, Sirena, has the monopoly over agencies and websites.

A couple of weeks ago, though, Tport managed to close a deal with the Russian CRM, so now about 7,000 agents are using a combined Tport Sirena International solution.
SO! Today, Tport is announcing  Q2 results (I will listen in) and some industry experts are arguing that it might be the moment to announce an IPO (Professor Sabena makes a strong case here: http://bit.ly/aDKOgg ). Stay tuned!

United PR: http://bit.ly/bgWCXW
Sputnik: http://bit.ly/9gvBd7
Sabre Rolls-Out Sabre Red
We cannot leave the last one of the triumvirate without a piece here: Sabre is set to roll out the Sabre Red Workspace globally. More here: http://bit.ly/9MHjcS

Industry Notables
LAN Airlines partners with Orbitz to offer package deals on Flights + Hotels. http://bit.ly/cZjL6B

Asia-Pacific takes over!!! The region now holds No.1 position in terms of passengers (close to 500 million for H1 2010) over Europe (488 m) and North America (471 m). http://bit.ly/8Yq9Zr

CO and SN start code-sharing on August 9th, enhancing EU and African connections. http://bit.ly/9ZZKn4

CO and BA start testing plant biofuels for jets. BA is innovating – Sir Alex Staun, you should celebrate. http://bit.ly/a1jAqG

Nice Op-Ed: GDSs v. Airlines by TOD on Tnooz. http://bit.ly/d9VwYJ

Have a Laugh
None on this, all serious stuff today.

Priceline.com Posts A Solid Second Quarter
Priceline.com announced a solid quarter yesterday – revenue is up 27.1% YoY, standing at $767.4 million. The net income is $115 m (almost as much as Expedia’s Q2). On the call, Mr. Boyd covered a number of topics.

a). New markets are doing well, especially booking.com and agoda.com in Asia, with some good results in Europe

b). Opaque pricing – Expedia and Travelocity are also showing it, but Priceline sees its business as well positioned, despite hurting market in the US

c). Google + ITA: Not a strong statement, taking what Google announced as future plans (more focused consumers to advertising websites). However, Mr. Boyd believes that over time, Google will become more of a competitive factor for them.

d). “Airline tickets are pretty small part of our total gross profit.” Similar story to Expedia.

All this info and the call @ Investor Relations section of Priceline.

Expedia, meanwhile, got into the blind booking game – showing a rate, without displaying the hotel brand. So once approaches overlap, it will get more and more interesting. http://bit.ly/bEZumu

Mexicana Files for Chapter 15 in the US, Operations Not Affected

Mexicana, part of OneWorld, filed yesterday for Chapter 15 bankruptcy (insolvency) in the US. The airline did an amazing job through all social media vehicles to calm down the passengers and according to latest reports, the operations are not affected. Chapter 15 bankruptcy is usually filed for cross-border settlements and transfer of jurisdiction when the filing company has business assets in the US.
The news comes in the middle of an upswing for OneWorld – getting clearance for mergers and trans-Atlantic cooperation and adding Kingfisher and Air Berlin to its portfolio.
The official alliance website has it as a top story, claiming that OneWorld passengers on connecting flights will not be affected.
Story: http://bit.ly/bdTHaD

Industry Notables
After Boeing, Embraer sees a slight improvement in Q2 profit — $70.3 m. http://bit.ly/ds7Qqw

Concur kicks off a direct connect with Amtrak (27.1 million pax last year). http://bit.ly/9UDEou

Turkish Airlines starts a code-share with US Airways. http://bit.ly/cEpDp6

In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) is growing, only broadband access is expected to deliver $95 m in revenue for the airlines. http://bit.ly/aWQJcF

TripIt integrates with Orbitz.  http://bit.ly/bigFN2

Navitaire extends partnership with Wizz Air to support growth of 100 planes over the next 7 years.

SITA signs a five-year deal with Abu Dhabi Airport to upgrade check-in platforms. http://bit.ly/ceTGBP

Have a Laugh
The fight of the domains. Last year, Fly.com was purchased for about $1.7 m (just the domain name) and now is an ever-growing meta-search engine that is a subsidiary of Travelzoo. Marketing has been extensive and growth has been spectacular, even though as growth ensured, the cost of revenue increased as well.
Now, we see another player doing similar meta-searches — Fly.co.uk, which is a separate company, owned by ASAP Ventures Ltd. Add to it a few other Fly – domains (fly.in, fly.cn, etc) and you will get multiple players fighting local traffic through global branding.

Not the perfect morning I would have imagined – either I am going absolutely nuts or my Google reader account just “deleted” all my marked items that I have been following…

Apple Attaches New Features to iTravel Patent

Industry experts might disregard the news, since Apple has not yet established itself as part of the travel ecosystem (as cited by Google). However, the company is pushing strongly with a suggested iTravel native application on the iOS (current snapshots include iPhone as a device, but undoubtedly, it will spill over to the iPad/iPod portfolio).

The news broke over the weekend and Mr. May from Tnooz does an outstanding round-up, pointing some of the features and using Patently Apple for picture evidence:
- airline check in and post-booking/pre-flight support (seat selection)
- hotel check-in and post-booking/post-check-in support (including concierge)
- destination management (possibly including maps other than what Google currently provides – let’s not forget Apple’s purchase of Poly9 a few weeks ago and let’s not forget that according to the Consumer Travel Report by PhoCusWright, maps are a big driver for traffic and customer retention on a website).
Also, there is a number of other app functions, that will pretty much combine multiple existing apps into one – Cab rides and in-room entertainment.
All good, up till now, but all this needs to be powered by different sources – flight search, hotel search, cab search and the respective bookings. Not to mention that for some seat-selection and post-booking flight services Apple needs to connect directly with the airline host. A massive effort lying ahead, but given the shipping record of the company, we are surely bound to see the next generation of the iPhone Traveler (why not the iTraveler).
Mr. May’s coverage: http://bit.ly/9urmsg

US Airlines Heading for a Round of GDS Negotiations
Some of the major EU carriers already did their GDS negotiations in 2009 and 2010, but apparently, the US carriers lag a year. The Beat gives us a nice snapshot of when the major US airlines will need to sit down at the negotiations table to sharpen the pencil with the GDSs. Most of the contracts are expiring in 2011, especially for the airlines currently being serviced by ITA Software. An amazing timing, setting up quite a debate and strategic thinking for next year (presumably, by that time, the DOJ will have approved the Google + ITA deal, and Google will have outed their new product).
Story: http://bit.ly/c6sHoB

Industry Notables
Alitalia does well in H1 2010, cuts loss in half to $215 m. http://bit.ly/d6oSWX

Virgin Atlantic releases select financial data, up on revenue 10% for March – May period (BA strike helped), but with a loss of $173 m for the fiscal year. http://bit.ly/bfSarC

BA reported loss of $190 m, attributing it to volcanic ash and crew strike. Q1 (theirs ends June 30th) loss is up 15.1% YoY. http://bit.ly/cqBWNM

ANA posts a narrower loss of $60 m (an approx. 6X improvement YoY). http://bit.ly/bG7xqe

Jetstar, Qantas’ LCC spin-off, pushes for eliminating pax custom checks on Australia – New Zealand flights. http://bit.ly/dBVZQg

Tiger Airways and Thai Airways join forces to introduce a new LCC in the APAC market – Thai Tiger. http://bit.ly/ag8mLu

EC opens antitrust case for Aegean/Olympic, after Aegean joined Star Alliance. http://bit.ly/cqBWNM

SkyScanner survey claims ~50% of pax care most about the price of the ticket. http://bit.ly/aGdWjv

Have a Laugh
Well, not really this time, but still some interesting items. Check out the new SkyTeam livery in a short youtube.com video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2yIF8FMJ7k

Bing Maps starts calculating Cab Fares. Mashable says it all: http://bit.ly/biCRV0

OTAs Start Posting Good Results, Airlines (US) Continue Strong Trend
Expedia Inc. reported an almost tripled profit for Q2 2010 on revenue up by 8%, putting the mark at $114 million. MakeMyTrip.com, the leading Indian OTA, is seeking a $100 million IPO on NASDAQ, despite being in the red for the past two years. Skyscanner brags about $4.5 million Q2 revenue…
The results that are streaming constantly show a significant improvement over 2009 (well, not surprising, given the state of the industry in that year), with major gains from US-based carriers and OTAs. As IATA correctly assumed, the only losing geography for the full 2010 will be Europe, where BA posted about $165 million loss for their financial Q1 (April – June), largely blamed on volcanic ash and strikes. Others are doing fine.
We hope that the trend continues, as we expect some other major carriers and OTAs to tell us how they did for this exciting quarter in the industry. Travelport is set to announce their results on August 5th, which we will follow closely.

EU Commission Strongly Agrees
The EU Commission did quite a bit of work over the last few weeks, giving its approval nod to first BA/IB merber, then AA/BA/IB, and finally, clearing the CO-UA merger on anti-trust grounds. DOJ already followed suit on the AA/BA/IB, but a decision on CO-UA is pending, after Mr. Smisek, CO’s CEO, was defending the move in Washington in June.
Industry experts agree that consolidation is the way to go and there are grounds that have not been explored yet in that regard: Asia and potentially Europe (there were some rumors circulating that Adria and Croatia Airlines will make a great carrier together). If that happens, capacity management will certainly become less of an issue, but local battles will become nicely outlined wars among carriers (Think Jetstar/Qantas v. Virgin Blue v. Tiger in Australia and OneWorld v. StarAlliance v. SkyTeam in trans-Atlantic).

Alliance Shake-Ups
One of the major items (which, funnily, did not get as much coverage as expected) was OneWorld’s invitation and subsequent acceptance to join the alliance by the German heavy-weight Air Berlin. The group includes LTU and Niki (among others) and will offer the OneWorld airlines nice hubs in LH-dominated German airspace (BER and DUS being strongholds of Air Berlin).

OneWorld also attracted Kingfisher (one of the leading LCC in India), paving the way of major networks to attract regional low-cost carriers, thus expanding their footprint. A natural move for OneWorld is to fight Aeroflot on their home turf by the expected full-membership of S7, a Russian LCC, which already partners with AB on certain routes.

So what’s next in that area? jetBlue could be a nice addition for StarAlliance (some code-sharing already happening with LH (which owns 19% of the carrier) and South African Airlines (also a Star Alliance member), which will definitely put the alliance in a very strong position in the US. Virgin Atlantic is also looking for partners and even though a full-network membership might be a stretch, partnering with specific carriers in different geographies will definitely benefit Sir Richard’s airline, which announced 10% improvement on revenue YoY.