Air France and KLM have further postponed the introduction of its GDS surcharge for business travel agencies, with the fee now due to be levied from 1 July 2024 rather than 1 January 2024, according to reports in French trade press.
The TMC surcharge, which already applies to leisure travel agencies, was initially scheduled to be introduced in September, 2022. This was then postponed until 31 March 2023 and then again until 1 January 2024.
Introduced to help drive NDC adoption, the fee has also gradually increased from €13 per GDS-booked segment, to €17 and is now expected to be €21.
Laurent Abitbol, chairman of French travel agency group Marietton Développement – whose brands include TMCs Ailleurs Business and Havas Voyages – made the announcement during the recent Selectour congress, where he thanked Air France for having "guaranteed revenues (of the network)", according to a report by Déplacements Pros.
Henri Hourcade, SVP France at Air France-KLM, then confirmed the news at the congress and said "all French TMCs benefit from it".
Commenting on the delay, the French Association of Travel Management (AFTM) said: “Adoption rates of NDC currently reported do not reflect the reality of this sector as they are largely distorted by the values achieved by certain sectors in the leisure market.
"This additional time will hopefully allow for the finalisation of the integration of NDC into the business environment and will quickly reap more benefits than additional costs.”
Speaking to BTN Europe, AFTM added: “Despite the numerous communication campaigns, awareness and education efforts that AFTM has made significant contributions to, we have seen strong resistance [to NDC] in the field of business travel, which is mainly due to the complexity of integrating this new model in a very complex professional environment.
“The players in this segment were not sufficiently involved upstream and many specific pitfalls were only discovered late.”
In June, the carriers removed short and medium-haul “Light” fares from traditional GDS channels. These fares are now only available via NDC connections.
Air France-KLM said in a statement that its “gentle approach” to introducing NDC was “now bearing fruit”, with 25 per cent of tickets issued through agencies now coming via NDC channels. The group added that the latest delay in introducing the GDS surcharge would allow the business travel ecosystem more time to "serenely" implement the new NDC-based distribution model.
“We are pleased with the involvement of all the players in the business travel ecosystem in the numerous NDC pilots involving distributors, corporate customers, technology suppliers, Air France and KLM,” said the company.
“These pilots reflect the excellent level of co-operation between all these players, and to date have produced tens of thousands of bookings via NDC, as well as, for certain players, the massive deployment of Air France and KLM's NDC offer in several countries.
“Air France and KLM note the mobilisation of all parties and the acceleration of the pilot phases. This illustrates our customers' desire to benefit from the advantages of NDC technology, in particular cheaper fares with our continuous pricing, and access to our lowest fares on short and medium-haul flights.
“This dynamic makes us confident about the adoption of NDC technology by the business travel ecosystem, which nonetheless requires a short additional lead time to implement this new distribution model serenely.
“These are the reasons why Air France and KLM have decided to extend the delay to apply the distribution surcharge until 30 June 2024, which will apply from 1 July for business travel agencies in the French and Dutch markets and global business travel players.”