What is Airline Alliances ?

 

An airline alliance is a network of individual airlines that cooperate with each other. Some benefits of airline alliances include:

Ø  Codesharing, where a flight is operated by one airline but marketed by another airline, allows individual airlines to gain market exposure and offer extended destinations within the alliance network

Ø  Lower costs for airlines by sharing overhead

Ø  Shared benefits like airline lounges

Ø  Ability to offer shared fares involving different airlines, such as round the world tickets

Ø  Frequent flyer agreements mean more opportunities for travellers to earn miles within the alliance network

Many travellers belong to an airline frequent-flyer programme and will request that their flights be booked on that airline, or an airline for which mileage can be accrued into their programme or lounge access is available. The easiest way to do this is to display availability for the airline's global alliance

Creating the BF 

A BF must contain a bare minimum of five fields. The five essential fields are easy to remember by thinking of the word "PRINT": P hone, R eceived-from, I tinerary, N ame and T icketing arrangement.

While most reservations will contain additional information, no BF will be without these five fields.

All five of these fields must be present before a BF may be "ended". Ending a BF is like quitting and saving changes to a file in a word processing programme, while ignoring a BF is like quitting without saving changes.

In this lesson, you will learn how to create the five essential BF fields and end a BF.

An agent's first step in building a BF is usually to create the itinerary. The itinerary is where you will begin as well, by learning how to book flights.