Huseyin Ozyurtcu, the owner of Picasso Travel, remembers a time more than four decades ago when KLM said that it planned to phase out its use of air ticket consolidators, of which his company is one.
Such a move might have been damning for Picasso, since KLM, along with Pan Am, were the behemoths at the time when it came to supplying consolidator inventory.
“Now, 45 years later, we are still going,” said Ozyurtcu, whose company maintains offices in six U.S. cities.
Airlines have made steady efforts in recent years to drive more ticket sales into direct channels. Many are also making a concerted attempt to merchandise their flights and seats as differentiated experiences rather than mere commodities that compete mostly on schedule and price.
But even as surging travel demand has coupled with still-recovering capacity levels over the past 10 months to create the most pricing power that airlines have experienced in recent memory, longtime air ticket consolidators say that business…
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