Topaz study: Travelport e-Pricing leads the travel industry in finding the lowest available airfares

Topaz tracked the performance and itinerary pricing results of four of the most prominent low-fare shopping tools in the travel industry.

Results revealed that e-Pricing not only finds lowest fares more often than other products, nearly 60% of the time overall, but also generates an average saving of $68.13 per ticket - substantial savings for corporations and consumers, and the travel agencies, travel management companies (TMC) and Web sites that support them.

"This Topaz survey provides the industry with the most up to date benchmarking data on low-fare search technology and highlights the strong performance of Travelport's e-Pricing,"

said Rabih Saab, Vice-President of Travelport GDS, Middle East.

"The study has produced substantial and reliable results, confirming that e-Pricing is the global market leader in low-fare shopping technology and therefore the best tool for travel agents to gain access to the lowest available fares."
Conducted in December 2008, the study tapped the top 500 domestic and international city pairs across Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa, North America and Latin America. This scope represents the largest range of itineraries studied by Topaz over the past year to produce GDS low-fare search benchmarking data.

The study produced the following results:

- Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available fare four times more often than the product powering the Amadeus GDS. Compared to Amadeus, e-Pricing finds the same or lower fare more than 78% of the time.

- Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available fare twice as often as the low-fare search technology from ITA Software. Compared to ITA, e-Pricing finds the same or lower fare more than 70% of the time.

- Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available fare twice as often as the tool offered by the Sabre GDS. Compared to Sabre, e-Pricing finds the same or lower fare more than 67% of the time.

- In comparing the average ticket price returned by each of the competing tools, Travelport e-Pricing generates the highest average ticket price saving, realizing up to $111.51 in savings compared to Amadeus, $48.88 compared to ITA, and $44 compared to Sabre.

- Overall, Travelport e-Pricing produces a $68.13 average consumer ticket price saving - or an average of 9.4% lower fares compared to competitive shopping products.

- Overall results revealed that e-Pricing obtains lowest fares 297 times out of 500 city pairs, or 59.4% of the time, when compared to competing products.

As part of Travelport's goal to deliver its most innovative technologies and buying strengths to every customer, the low-fare shopping power of e-Pricing is being introduced to subscribers of Travelport's Galileo GDS globally during 2009.
"We are committed to offering our customers the best travel solutions possible and our e-Pricing product delivers the kind of value and flexibility they are demanding in an increasingly competitive environment," concluded Saab.

Travelport e-Pricing can return up to 350 unique available fares in a single search to give travel buyers the broadest range of choices. It employs an exclusive fare caching technology that minimizes hits on airline reservations systems while maximizing fare data integrity and distribution performance for airlines worldwide in today's dynamic travel shopping environment.