Amadeus says it is considering ‘screen scraping’ fares off some low cost carriers which withhold the cheapest priced air fares from their commercial agreements.
Rudy Daniello, head of travel channels, products and services, said that in some cases low cost carriers would allow Amadeus to use its fares on its global distribution system (GDS) but that the three lowest prices were kept off the system, and only sold them direct.
“It might be that one day we do what we have never done before,” he said. “We might screen scrape. If we have to do it we will do it.
“At least then from our point of view we will have homogenous access.”
Speaking at Amadeus’ Search Matters event in London on Thursday, Daniello was clear that the tech firm was reluctant to screen scrape – but suggested there was no other option in some cases if they want to offer users of Amadeus’ GDS the full range of content and the lowest prices.
“We do not aggregate content, we integrate content,” Daniello added. “We need those three cheapest fares and the only way we can get them is screen scraping. Through screen scraping we would integrate the data.”
