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• What is the airline vision for developing distribution strategy?
• How do airlines manage the implementation of the strategies they devise?
• How has the distribution landscape changed, even over the past year?
• Is it just the addition of the Internet as a consumer channel that has changed, or are there far more variables to take into account in the modern world?

Airlines have many channel opportunities.

• How does an airline go about defining and delivering the optimal channel mix?
• How do the economics vary across the channels?
• Now the GDSs are offering substantial reductions in booking fees in return to access to inventory and pricing, how has the channel mix changed and what does the equilibrium look like?
• How do airlines products and services define the channel?

The huge shifts in distribution strategy in past few years have had a major affect on the revenue management discipline.

What are the airlines doing to increase revenue in this new competitive landscape?
The market is more transparent than it has ever been. This has tended to pull prices down. How has change in the distribution landscape impacted the ability to charge? How has revenue management changed? Are the fare families now available simply a representation of previous techniques, or has distribution, especially the direct channel, shaped the thinking in revenue management?

What about ancillary revenue? How will this affect the demand and or pricing for airlines' core products and services? What are the implications of ancillary revenue on revenue management practice?

The panel will discuss the ways revenue management has changed to adapt to distribution channels.

Historically the airlines have built up both a method and the underlying community technology to manage payment and risk in the BSPs and ARC.

New entrants have tended to avoid this mechanism and are using products and services from the mainstream such as credit cards to outsource payment risk. Credit card holdback has been blamed for putting one airline into chapter 11 and one airline has created its own payments network to allow it to sell before it obtains AOCs.

How is the landscape for payments evolving? What are the issues with managing payments in the modern world? How does this vary with geography and airline business models? How are airlines balancing credit risk with costs associated with cards and the implications for cash?

Airline Chief Information Officers are faces with an interesting and permanent challenge. They have to meet new requirements whilst maintaining existing systems and services, and do so by combining providers' offerings, managing integration and their own team of specialists.

They are asked to support a wide variety of processes from revenue management, inventory control, reservations, revenue accounting, payment and reconciliation, ticketing, pricing and distribution.

On the whole, the more complex the business model, the more complex the systems landscape.

• How do the CIOs manage the challenge of a changing distribution landscape?
• Where are they making investments in internal capabilities and where do they look to the market place for solutions?
• Where are the primary challenges?
• What are the true economics of technology for distribution?