Open Jaw promises cheaper non-GDS fare search

Irish travel technology form Open Jaw is looking to bring down the cost of flight searches via GDSs for online travel agents with its tie-up with Vayant Travel Technologies.

Vayant’s next generation technology, which promises sub-second results, sits behind Open Jaw’s flight search in its recently launched t-retail platform.

Open Jaw said, with travel customers searching more and more before booking, the cost of queries through the established GDSs is soaring.

Kieron Branagan, Open Jaw chief executive, said: “One of the things we see as a real business benefit of using Vayant is for our customers in the online world.

“There are a lot of people who do a lot of looking before they purchase something. Our challenge is can we get the best inspiration to reduce the time between looking and shopping.

“The problem with looking is it’s a very expensive process. For most of our clients’ systems we are hitting Amadeus or Sabre or Travelport. GDS’s do fare shopping very well but it’s expensive.

“We are trying to change the economics of that so people do search through non-GDS routes so search does not cost as much.”

Open Jaw is a preferred partner for Vayant which announced the launch of FastSearch at the recent ITB trade fair in Berlin.

Vayant director of product marketing Boyan Manev, said: “We compartmentalised search into fares, schedules, taxes, and availability.

“FastSearch avoids the traditional caching methods used by much of the travel industry; whenever any changes are made to any components we update the results in real time.”

Branagan said the advantage of Vayant is its worldwide coverage, something Google’s ITA software is incapable of, and the ability to offer calendar searches as well as price and destination queries.

Open Jaw is monitoring Google’s activities around flight and hotel search in the US carefully, Branagan said, particularly the recent move to provide a reservations system for Cape Air.

This came after a previous attempt by ITA to provide its Passenger Service System to Air Canada was shelved.

“We think that’s one of a number of announcements that they will make. ITA combined with Google is going to be very interesting,” he said.

However, Branagan believes Google’s feared move into the travel meta-search and retail space is by no means certain.

“One of the challenges around Google flight and hotel search is it could kill off their own advertising eco-system with travel advertisers.”