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Showing posts with label CWT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CWT. Show all posts

Monday, October 6, 2008

CWT and UA Make Nice Nice

This is mostly to close up an ealier post and let everyone know that CWT and United has once again agreed to be friends. From the Travel Weekly (which is updated daily):

"Carlson Wagonlit Travel and United Airlines have come to terms on a preferred-supplier agreement...CWT spokeswoman Shannon Coughlin said no further comments or deails would be released...."


Sheesh - they made their spats so public, but then take their make up private. How's a blog supposed to make a living??

Thursday, September 18, 2008

CWT QSI on UA ASAP !

According the an article in TravelWeekly.com (which comes out daily by the way) - It looks like CWT is having a spat with United and "continues to move market share away from the carrier"

The Beat is also on it saying that UA canceled its U.S. CWT agreement in June, so CWT in turn cancelled its International agreement - and they have not come to terms on a commission structure.

As a result - "[CWT] have shifted a substantial amount of traffic away from United... We are still shifting business away from United when all else is equal. Where there are markets served by United as well as other major carriers, and scheduling and pricing is as good for our clients, we have taken business away from United in favor of primarily one of the other big four U.S. carriers."

Overall - this seems pretty crazy. We know UA is taking aim at their huge commission costs, but UA also relies very heavily on agency corporate business. CWT being the biggest out there - seems like a tough fight. In addition, IF it's true that they are successfully moving business away from UA - it seems like this will only get worse once CWT starts to broaden the reach of online Symphonie initiatives and can easily automate rules to their clients.

UA used to place a huge emphasis on the QSI metric - the "Quality of Service" that is the marker for how much any agency should be selling on any route. We wonder if they have moved away from this - or if CWT really wasn't selling much of UA to begin with...