Travelport e-Pricing Leads in Low Airfare Search

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Travelport e-Pricing finds the lowest available airfares worldwide, according to a new international benchmarking study conducted by Topaz International, a major airfare auditing firm. Topaz tracked the performance and itinerary pricing results of four of the most prominent low-fare shopping tools in the travel industry. Travelport GDS released the results of the study.

The results revealed that e-Pricing  finds lowest fares more often than other products, nearly 60 percent of the time overall. The system 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 is the latest and most accurate benchmarking data available on low-fare search technology, and it reflects the performance of Travelport e-Pricing, which was not tested in an outdated audit that is still being promoted by a competitor,” said Armin Meier, chief commercial officer for Travelport GDS.

e-Pricing is being introduced to subscribers of Travelport’s Galileo and Apollo GDSs globally during 2009. Major online retailers, airlines of all sizes and Worldspan-connected travel agencies have e-Pricing.

“Just as important, the competitor's study tracked performance and pricing on 150 fewer city pairs than were used in our study, and the Travelport study also included many city pairs that originated outside of the United States. All of these criteria produced more substantial and reliable results, clearly confirming that e-Pricing is the global market leader in low-fare shopping technology,” Meier said.

Conducted in December 2008, the study tapped the top 500 domestic and international city pairs across Asia Pacific, EMEA, North America and Latin America.

Results include:

* 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 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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 percent of the time, when compared to competing products.

Visit www.travelport.com/e-pricing