Poke in the Eye (4 Travel)

We were at the Eye 4 Travel North American Conference – that now combines 3 conferences into one: Distribution / Ancillary Revenue / Revenue Management. Man has this conference really taken a hit. Fairly brutal in terms of content (weak), speakers (boring) and attendance (low), and there is only ONE thing that saves it from being a complete waste:

VEGAS BABY !!

By our definition – any trip to Vegas is time well spent. And since the craps tables were kind to us this year, we’d probably categorize this as a great trip overall – even if the conference was pretty much a waste.

Basically – the morning has only two items of note, both from Frontier Airlines:

Jim Young – VP Distribution had some actual numbers regarding:

1) Travel insurance. Finally !! It looks like only 0.5% of travelers buy insurance if it outside the booking path, and about 5% if the option to purchase travel insurance in within the booking path.

Finally – some real hard numbers that make sense. 1 in 20 buy insurance – those are numbers we can believe in.

2) Also – Frontier says that 50% of travellers check in a first bag, and 5% check in a second bag (which is down from 11% since they instituted a fee).

Young was asked, if oil continues to go down – will the baggage fees stay? While noting that carriers always have to keep an eye on competition, he believes fees are here to stay now that they are introduced to the market, are big money for airlines, and seem to be accepted as a cost of doing travelling now. Can't beat honesty ! We concur. No one pulls a legit revenue stream (except maybe Blockbuster late fees).