Since the announcement of the new routes that Delta will be serving from New York City‘s LaGuardia airport a few weeks back it has been clear that the carrier is looking to make a splash in the market and build their share of traffic in a big way. To reach this goal they’ve apparently gone to a rather unusual avenue for marketing domestic air service: Travel Agents.
Airlines have continually cut and cut again on air travel commissions to agents, essentially killing them off outright. But Delta is putting some back out there, at least in the short term, in an effort to drive bookings on their new routes. Here’s what the numbers look like:
I’m not sure how much demand there is going to be for the premium cabin on those routes but even a number of coach fares are getting in on the action. Not too shabby.
It is hard to know if this is Delta responding to soft future bookings on the new routes, trying to raise travel agent awareness of the new routes or something completely different. Regardless of the motivation, it is definitely a blast from the past with the commissions.
Related Posts:
- Postview of the Delta/LaGuardia announcement
- Preview of the Delta/LaGuardia announcement
- New York/Washington slot swap approved
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TAs with a good relationship with DL may or may not get a higher commission than that. 🙂
Also, AA has matched for certain cities.
At the height of the Travel Agent’s participation in ticketing (post deregulation) what percent of gross fare did ‘plated’ agents usually recieve?