Low Cost Carriers, GDS and Intermediaries are friends, enemies and squabbling children all at the same time

In the early days of Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) the world was simple. No GDS, No intermediaries, No food, No frils. Then LCCs started calling themselves New World Carriers and introducing frils (see my discussion on this re Virgin Blue in June this year). A few news stories have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks which may be pointing to another evolutionary change in the LCC/GDS/Intermediary relationship:

• easyJet announced a distribution deal in Europe with both Amadeus and Galileo. On cue - Ryanair's Peter Sharrard channelled his best O'Leary impersonation by slamming the deal and calling travel agents the "greatest deadwood of the travel industry" (travelmole);
• Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline.com all announced that JetBlue flights would be available for sale (BusinessWeek via Hotelmarketing.com); and
• Tiger Airways held the line saying that it will not make its inventory available to online players in Australia despite many in Australia such as Webjet and Travel.com.au have aggregation engines that could access Tiger inventory without Tiger having to participate in a GDS. As Rob Dell, president of the Association of Travel Management Companies, pointed out in this Age Online article this position could well change as per Virgin Blue.

Putting these together and we have the LCC herd splitting into the Hard Core (Ryanair, Tiger, maybe Air Asia) and the New Core (easyJet, Virgin Blue, JetBlue). Last thing we need is new acronyms (the HCLCC and the NCLCC) but is clear that the view of low cost carriers doing it for themselves is no longer universally true.