旅游生意:中间商难以出局_BEC初级作文

旅游生意:中间商难以出局

At the dawn of the internet age, airlines assumed that the middlemen who came between them and their passengers were headed for extinction. Travellers would eventually buy tickets either from the airlines' own websites or from price-comparison engines which hooked up directly to the airlines' computers over the web. So why pay commissions to agents? And why continue to own reservation systems, especially since regulators had stopped them from fiddling with travel agents' GDS screens to place their own flights at the top? So Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia sold most of their shares in Amadeus (the largest GDS); American Airlines sold Sabre; British Airways and KLM sold out of Galileo; and so on.

在互联网时代之初，航空公司认为他们和乘客之间的中间商即将出局。旅客们会从航空公司自己的网站上或从和航空公司计算机直接相连的价格比较引擎上直接购票。那么，为什么还要支付给代理商佣金呢？为什么还要继续拥有自己的预订系统，特别是由于监管机构已经禁止他们与旅行社协议将自家的航班放在GDS屏幕的最上方。因此，汉莎航空、法航和伊比利亚出售其拥有的艾玛迪斯（全球最大的分销系统）的股份；美国航空公司出售Sabre，英国航空公司和荷兰皇家航空出售Galileo等等。

However, the loss of direct commission from airlines made travel agents more beholden to the GDSs, which not only slip them a share of fees but also provide their back-office computing. Many online travel agencies have come to resemble physical ones, signing up with a GDS which provides a reservations system and other computing power while handing them a commission (ultimately paid by the airlines) on every booking. Despite airlines' efforts to make travellers bypass agents and come to their own websites, less than half of flights are booked this way.