Airline Distribution Explained and Travel Payments Explained, the first two volumes of Travel Industry Explained, are out.
They exist because I could not find them while I was doing the job. Almost everything written about airline distribution and travel payments is written by someone with a commercial interest in it. Standards bodies publish specifications, which is not the same thing as judgement. Vendors publish content marketing laid out like research. Consultancy work is commissioned, and that shapes what it concludes. And the practitioners who genuinely know are mostly not allowed to publish anything at all.
Each book ends with a scored diagnostic, and that is the part I use most in real work. Thirty items for distribution, forty for payments.
They should exist outside the book, so here they are, as fillable PDFs. Free, and yours whether or not you ever buy anything.
Why they are scored rather than a checklist
A checklist gives you ticks, and ticks flatter you. Almost everything on a distribution or payments checklist is half true in a real company, so a tick is usually a small lie.
So each item scores 0, 1 or 2. Zero if it is unknown or absent, one if it is partial or untested, two if it is in place, measured and owned by a named person.
The zeros are the useful part. An item you cannot answer is not a low score. It is an unowned question, and unowned questions are where money leaks in both of these fields.
What is in them
The Distribution Strategy Audit. Thirty items, maximum sixty. Who constructs the offer, who computes the price, who controls availability, who holds the order, and who granted the permission. Effective net GDS cost after discounts and surcharge recoveries. Content commitments and parity clauses. Agency sales at risk at seasonal peak. ADM issuance and recovery. Prorate and interline leakage. The order transformation, scored honestly rather than aspirationally.
Unaudited carriers typically land between 20 and 35. A well run distribution function scores above 48.
The Travel Payments Health Check. Forty items, maximum eighty. Cost of payment by channel and method, measured rather than quoted. Authorisation and false decline rates. Merchant of record, and who actually carries the risk. Acquiring terms and collateral against forward sold inventory. Chargeback and refund operations. Settlement timing and working capital. Fraud tooling, and what it costs you in good customers.
How I would use them
Score them with someone from the other side of the house. The distribution audit with someone from finance, the payments health check with someone from commercial. The disagreements are the output. In my experience two people from the same function agree far too easily, and the number they agree on is usually too high.
Then date the sheet and repeat it in a year. The movement tells you more than the total ever will.
On the way.
Check your inbox in the next minute or two. If nothing arrives, look in spam and promotions, then write to me at [email protected] and I will send them by hand.
If you ticked the box, I will email you when a new book comes out. The diagnostics arrive either way.
The books
Airline Distribution Explained. Who is allowed to sell an airline ticket, through which pipe, at whose price, and for whose fee. The whole machine explained from its economics: the GDS model and what it actually costs after discounts and surcharge recoveries, BSP and ARC as the credit systems they really are, interline and prorate leakage, the direct channel's true cost including the marketing auctions the bypass speeches never mention, NDC judged honestly after a decade, and where all of it goes next. It ends with the thirty item audit above.
Travel Payments Explained. How airlines and travel companies actually get paid, at what cost, and carrying what risk. Cost of payment measured rather than quoted. Authorisation and false declines. Merchant of record, and who really carries the liability. Acquiring terms and collateral against forward sold inventory. Chargebacks, refunds, settlement and working capital. It ends with the forty item health check above.
Both are on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover: the books. The third volume, Airline Systems Explained, is on pre-order for 10 November, and two more are written: one on loyalty programmes read as financial businesses rather than as marketing, and one on airline retailing.
The diagnostics are free either way and always will be. You do not need the books to use them, although the items will make more sense if you have read them.