The unbundling battle is moving, shifting from the airlines to the travel agent, both real and on-line, as the big three major Global Distribution Systems - Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport - hustle to deploy systems and initiatives that will allow agents to sell up and let home shoppers consider ancillaries and spend.
Sabre has made the biggest splash so far with its Attribute-Based shopping, a 'solution' that will be available to travel agents in the first quarter of 2009, but its rivals say that they have some unique features. At Travelport, for instance, a major project will allow travel agents to customise an airline's offering, while at Amadeus, progress with large clients such as Air Canada and Qantas will lead to a major new offering next year.
Kyle Moore, Sabre's vice president of product marketing, said during a presentation that the Attributes Shopper allows easier price comparison, which may address one of the public's major complaints: complexity and opacity. In fact, a survey by Amadeus, a major rival of Sabre's, suggests that travellesr accept ancillary fees if they are clearlye stated - and if the airlines' don't push too far. Robert Buckman, the Amadeus North American director of airline distribution strategies, says, "consumers won't feel nickel-and-dimed if they are getting something they value, whether it is choice, convenience or simplification.'  
But it is the simplification that is the challenge. As Moore puts it, "complexity is the friend of the agent. Air-travel shopping has become very complex."

First you build a hanger, then you rebuild the plane. And that's what Luftie is doing up in the snowy wilds of the great state of Maine with its newly built hangar at the Auburn-Lewiston airport. There, it's officially commenced restoration of the Lockheed 'Super Star,' the first long-haul aircraft operated by Lufthansa capable of non-stop trans-Atlantic flights. Over the next three years, the aircraft will be brought back into flying condition so that by 2011 it can take to the air again from its new base in Germany once it has been newly registered and repainted in Lufthansa's historic colours.

Vox populi: the voice of the people has spoken, and it has told airline guys to think again. So they did, and in response to protest by their frequent flyers, some major carriers have reversed recently announced changes to their loyalty plans
The latest is US Airways, which reversed a widely unpopular move and said it would reinstate bonus miles and a 500-mile minimum benefit for members with Preferred status in its Dividend Miles plan. The carrier had rescinded the minimum award and the bonus points earlier in the year, and said it would give the elites only as many points as the actual miles flown. For travellers in the top tier of its Dividend Miles program, Preferred flyers who schlep 100,000 miles a year or more, the change had the effect of cutting their mileage balance in half. Randy Petersen, the frequent-flyer expert behind FlyerTalk and InsideFlyer magazine, began an on-line campaign he called 'Save Dividend Miles' to bring attention to the decision and he was overwhelmed with postings. So in response the carrier will reinstate the awards retroactively to August 6 for members of the four preferred status levels.

A rare grumbling is heard. Or seldom is heard a discouraging word at least at Southwest Airlines. But the airline's pilots union seems to have joined their cross-town counterparts at American Airlines in criticising their management. But there's a big difference: the Allied Pilots Association at American is making its very loud grumblings in any forum it can find. But over at Southwest, what dissatisfaction there is comes

Man, this woman is always angry. She's Kate Hanni, most vocal of the advocates of a passenger bill of rights. Hanni, of the Coalition for an Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, was the sole dissenting vote among 34 to the DOT's Tarmac Task Force, as the Department called the airport/airline/labor/passenger group that it set up to give guidance on dealing with extended delays during bad weather or mechanical failures.
In the end after lengthy meetings, the task force decide to push a voluntary plan that stresses frequent communications with passengers rather than such provisions as a mandatory return to the gate to allow passengers to deplane. The Task Force was created in December 2007 after such well-publicized events as a December 2006 eight-hour delay of an American Airlines plane at the Austin airport or the massive JetBlue 'meltdown' during a February 2007 ice storm at New York's JFK airport. Hanni, who happened to take part in the Austin disaster, promptly denounced the report as "an insult to airline passengers."

It must have been a hot time out in Hoosier Land the other day. They opened the new airport terminal in Indianapolis, and it's really a new airport, even though they're using the same runways. The thing is, they moved the terminal so it's sort in a logical place rather than being way off to the side, like the old one, so now airliners don't have to take a trip through several counties to get to and from the city's actual airport. We were supposed to talk with John Kish, who runs the airport and the indeed the city's airport authority, but every time we connected, he had to go run to another media demand. You know how those reporters are. We finally got to John, who explained, "it really is a new airport..."

Farelogix, which likes to call itself "the last GNE standing," says it is taking a tack toward the open source community with a new application it will be offering travel agents for free, starting next March. Dubbing its open source application Hawkeye, the company's chief, Jim Davidson, tells us that agents can use Hawkeye with or without tying into the main Farelogix products, the FLX platform; agencies can also built the open source front-end package into a custom application. Farelogix, which will be the community coordinator and manager, may be taking a risk in making the source code available for free, but, he says, "a certain number of people will take the source code and come back to us for our black box," which is the FLX middleware.