The air travel distribution (booking and selling of airline tickets and related products to customers) is dominated by an oligopoly of 4 Global Distribution System (GDS) companies. They provide a global IT-based reservation network to mediate between travel agencies, airlines and customers, charging airlines a fee of around 5€ per transaction, which poses a great pressure on airlines profitability. GDSs enable exclusive services such as interlining, extra luggage, seat selection and catering. For travel agencies they give access to a very wide offer of all the airlines operating through the GDS with just one system integration. However, GDSs pose a high risk to market competition, since they are being investigated or sued in the EU and USA for their breach of antitrust rules.
Airlines need to cut down distribution costs and regain control over their services and customers so that they can offer better personalized services and cross-selling. Although airlines have tried to avoid GDSs by reinforcing their direct sales channels, they have a great overhead to develop and maintain their own IT solutions in terms of workforce needed, IT resources and time. The result is that distribution through GDSs still represents 55% of the air travel distribution limiting innovation and new markets creation in an evolving industry oriented towards air retailing.
biztribution reinvents the industry by creating a new revolutionary automated and simple distribution model for the air travel and tourism sector. Based on blockchain technology, we enable airlines to recover governance over their content and customers, creating a shift of paradigm towards a fully decentralized scenario, translating into more efficient operations and significant reduction of distribution costs by avoiding overheads and intermediaries.
In our model, all actors can provide and access content across a distributed blockchain network, resulting in benefits that percolate to the whole industry.
