Emirates to snub third parties with new digital retailing platform

Current GDS systems are “not fit for purpose” and some intermediaries are “parasites”, Emirates president Sir Tim Clark told delegates at the Aviation Festival in London last week. 

The airline is therefore developing its own digital retailing platform, according to a report in TTG.

“The notion that we should have intermediaries accessing our range of products and charging us for the use of their service – it should probably be the other way around,” he said.

“As we move to ‘disintermediarise’ the business and strip costs out of distribution and consumer reach, it is incumbent upon us to create a process so that when someone thinks they want to fly somewhere they will think of the airline, so intermediaries no longer have a place.

“That is fighting talk but the fact of the matter is there are too many parasites in the business who are slowing our business and taking value from it because their own business models need to do that. That affects what we do and the price of our goods.”

“The trick”, he said was to “present your product in such a way that customers won’t go to anyone else; they’ll come straight to us if they want to fly with Emirates. They won’t go to metasearch”.

Clark  added: “The digital disruption that we all face is staring us in the face”.

His view is that a digital disruption group will “come along and redesign all the digital platforms that exist, processes that will streamline by up to 50% what we do”.
“I’ve been banging the drum about the way we are, as an industry constrained by the legacy distribution systems,” he continued.

“I’m not satisfied that the GDS systems of distribution on offer are fit for purpose in the next five or 10 years, particularly in light of what’s been going on in the digital world.”