A leading travel facilitator of Asia-Pacific, 'Abacus International' has launched a new airfare pricing system titled 'Abacus SmartPrice', which gives more fare options for travel agents fare queries.
Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Abacus International, Don Birch, said that the new pricing system would improve by over 50 percent the efficiency of the fares and pricing process and provide the travel agents more competition in the market.
He said that instead of travel agent querying individual searches for every alternative fare, 'Abacus SmartPrice' anticipates the need for alternatives and delivers them in a single screen.
"Abacus SmartPrice will allow our network more than 15,000 travel agency locations to search for the best fare with far greater reach and accuracy than the existing solutions, accessing up to 650 qualifying fares from up to 32 airlines from a single simple inquiry," he said.
He said that the launch of new pricing system would boost the competitiveness of Pakistan's travel agents in the battle for best fares, and follow extensive research into the needs of corporate and retail travel agents across Asia-Pacific.
Abacus Distribution Systems (Pvt) Ltd General Manager in Pakistan, Sam Wong, said that 'Abacus' pricing system would help keep the travel agents in the driver's seat of the industry by giving them access to an extremely broad, segmented, accurate and rich range of airfares.
He said that previously the agents had to rely heavily on their own knowledge to search for possible alternative routes and carriers. But now they have more options and fastest system to search for alternative routes and carriers.
Changes in international and domestic airline fares, rules, routings and footnotes are also electronically received and processed, up to six times, daily ensuring timely, accurate airfare content, he said.
"The development of 'Abacus SmartPrice' to meet the needs of both the travel agents and the airlines will reinforce Abacus's role as Asia-Pacific's leading travel facilitator, managing more than 50 million bookings per year," he added.