Branded Fares (Record S8)

Branded Fares in Fare Quote

Branded fares allow for airlines to define “brands”, such as “light”, “saver”, “basic” under which they have specific services included.

Each carrier has its own definition, and names. What is included in their brand is defined in their ATPCO filing, and it may vary per passenger type, fare type, account code, even PCC.

The brands available on your itinerary may not be the same as the ones available for another agency, for another passenger type, for another flight number.

Whereas there is no distinction in FD about the fare family and brands, as soon as you price the itinerary, system will return the brand priced (if this is a branded fare) and you will be able to select another brand.

Select the tab “matrix” to see a sum-up of what is included in the brand:

If you would like to price a specific brand, which “tier” you already know, use the below entry:

FQ*:BF3 (BF3 : branded fare, tier 3)

Note that all tiers do not necessarily apply on your itinerary, and system will only return a fare if that matches.

Tier numbers may also change depending on the airline updates and filing. It is advisable to always check and select the expected brands from the options returned by Smartpoint.

Select the brand on each flight and click “Fare Quote”.

Click on “rebook” to finalize.

For any discrepancy you would like to report, a screenshot from what you expect would facilitate the investigation, as well as any information about the brand name/fare family, ATPCO sequence (if possible).

Branded Fares in Fare Quote Best Buy (FQBB)

FQ is designed to price a fare in the booked class/RBD, hence during brand upsell/down sell the system would price the corresponding brand tier looking for the lowest fare in the booked RBD for each brand tier, even though lower/cheaper options may exist if changing to different booking codes.

If the system is unable to find a fare as booked for a particular brand tier, during upsells the system would offer the cheapest fare among the fares available with the rest of the booking codes in the tier. On the other hand, for down sells, FQ would always require finding the fare on the same booking code, and if none exist no down sell is offered. In Smartpoint, the down sell is inhibited from the display as the intention is not to promote down sell on much cheaper fare then they originally booked, as user has clearly asked for as booked RBD fares. Only upsells are promoted other than RBD fares.

FQBB is designed to price the lowest available fare within each brand “compartment” (economy, business, etc.)

In the below example, Galileo is matching “ALL GDS” fare family which has several brands under each brand being matched based on the FBC priced.

***ECONOMY BRAND TIER

ECONOMY PROMO LITE -RPO- RPL-

ECONOMY PROMO -RSX- RSO-

FLAT - BCHSOC BPX-

ECONOMY LITE -NB- -NO-

ECONOMY SAVER -VU- -VO-

ECONOMY CLASSIC -FX-

ECONOMY FLEX -FM- -FO-

***COMFORT BRAND TIER

COMFORT BASE -BS- -BO-

COMFORT CLASSIC -CO- -CL-

COMFORT FLEX -FO- -FM-

***BUSINESS BRAND TIER

BUSINESS BASE -BS- -BO-

BUSINESS CLASSIC -CL- -CO-

BUSINESS FLEX -FO- -FM-

If the priced brand is ECONOMY LITE and FQBB offers R R N N R classes, all other economy brands would be offered in R R N N R.

On the other hand, if the priced brand is ECONOMY CLASSIC and FQBB*:BF6 offers N N N N R classes, all other economy brands would be offered in N N N N R classes.

In short, during upsells, when the fares system attempts to offer Brands Upsell, the baseline used by the system is of the booked/offered lowest RBD fare and starts searching the cheapest brand within each applicable compartment branding.