In 1972 I’d only been on the planet for 12 months but from what I’ve been told, it was a great time for kids: bouncy space hoppers, Raleigh Chopper bikes, T. Rex and David Bowie, and gallons of Corona cherryade.

All those are long gone. Yet, amazingly, there is a computing format dating back to those earlier days which is still used in our industry today. Plain text files (and yes, that’s every bit as dated as it sounds) is the technology underpinning passenger name records (PNRs).

Let’s unpack this a little. A PNR is the booking record created when a reservation is made through a GDS. Around 40% of business travel bookings are now made through other channels, such as booking.com or directly via the airline’s website. Non-GDS content is often cheaper and offers more options on a number of fronts.

But many TMCs still rely on GDSs to power all their processes, including maintaining their ‘filing cabinet’ of booking records. Therefore, when they handle a non-GDS booking, TMCs create what’s known as a ‘passive’ segment to store the reservation data inside the GDS. As more bookings go outside the GDS, the number of passives is mushrooming. At TripStax, we recently surpassed one million passive segments.

What’s wrong with passives, you might ask? Well, there’s the cost and inconvenience. Hosting passives costs the GDSs money and creates a burden around data storage too, which is why they are cracking down, either charging TMCs for all passives or for exceeding a stated percentage of all PNRs. At a couple of quid a time, it quickly adds up. 

Perhaps even worse, passives only carry limited information. The clue’s in the name: they are historic and cannot be updated if the traveller changes or cancels their booking.

That’s a serious challenge for essential functions like traveller tracking. Say an aircraft crashes and you want to know if one of your team was on board. The passive PNR might tell you they took a different flight and you wouldn’t know they had switched.

The crazy thing is that passive segments aren’t needed any more. Modern TMC technology, like the TripStax Core, is a sophisticated data processing architecture using API connectivity. It’s active, not passive: no matter the source, the reservation is directly piped from the supplier so that amendments are instant and automatic.

That means records are current and accurate, leading to better traveller tracking, precise invoicing and other important functions like emissions counting.

It’s hugely significant that travel technology is evolving but awareness around its capabilities is key.

It’s time to stop using passive segments and getting the GDSs to masquerade as old filing cabinets and start capitalising on all the goodness and flexibility that comes with the latest technology.

tripstax.com