Air France-KLM again postpones GDS surcharge

Air France and KLM have further postponed the introduction of its GDS surcharge for business travel agencies, with the fee now due to be levied from 1 July 2024 rather than 1 January 2024, according to reports in French trade press.

The TMC surcharge, which already applies to leisure travel agencies, was initially scheduled to be introduced in September, 2022. This was then postponed until 31 March 2023 and then again until 1 January 2024.

Introduced to help drive NDC adoption, the fee has also gradually increased from €13 per GDS-booked segment, to €17 and is now expected to be €21.

Laurent Abitbol, chairman of French travel agency group Marietton Développement – whose brands include TMCs Ailleurs Business and Havas Voyages – made the announcement during the recent Selectour congress, where he thanked Air France for having “guaranteed revenues (of the network)”, according to a report by Déplacements Pros.

Henri Hourcade, SVP France at Air France-KLM, then confirmed the news at the congress and said “all French TMCs benefit from it”.

Commenting on the delay, the French Association of Travel Management (AFTM) said: “Adoption rates of NDC currently reported do not reflect the reality of this sector as they are largely distorted by the values achieved by certain sectors in the leisure market.

“This additional time will hopefully allow for the finalisation of the integration of NDC into the business environment and will quickly reap more benefits than additional costs.”

Speaking to BTN Europe, AFTM added: “Despite the numerous communication campaigns, awareness and education efforts that AFTM has made significant contributions to, we have seen strong resistance [to NDC] in the field of business travel, which is mainly due to the complexity of integrating this new model in a very complex professional environment. 

“The players in this segment were not sufficiently involved upstream and many specific pitfalls were only discovered late.”

In June, the carriers removed short and medium-haul “Light” fares from traditional GDS channels. These fares are now only available via NDC connections.

BTN Europe has approached Air France-KLM for comment.