# Airline ancillary merchandising

Your direct channel merchandises well and your indirect channel does not. A post-booking cart carries your own offer set and your own prices into both.

Airline ancillary merchandising is strong in the direct channel and thin
everywhere else. The passenger shown a full seat map on your own site sees
nothing comparable when the booking came through a partner, and neither channel
does much once the booking confirms. A post-booking cart closes both gaps.

## Merchandising is not your problem. Reach is.

Your own booking flow is among the most carefully worked pages in the business.
Branded fares, a seat map of the real cabin, bag pricing that reflects the
market: the offer logic has had a decade of attention and it converts.

Then that offer set has to travel. A booking made through an agency, a corporate
channel, or a partner site arrives holding the fare and very little else. The
passenger is not shown the seat map, frequently is not shown a bag price at all,
and discovers both at the airport. That is not a merchandising failure. It is a
distribution one, and it costs you twice: once because nothing was offered, and
once because the passenger arrives with an expectation your ground staff have to
settle.

| Where the booking was made | Shown at the time of sale | Shown between booking and departure | Who set the price |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Your site or app | Your full offer set, merchandised by you | A manage-booking page that mostly informs | You |
| An agency or corporate channel | The fare, plus whatever that partner chose to show | Whatever that partner chooses to send | Nobody, if the offer never arrives |
| A partner running a post-booking cart | The fare | Your offer set, in the partner's branding | You |

## One offer set, wherever the booking was made

The useful way to think about a post-booking cart is not as another channel. It
is a way of putting an offer you already control in front of a passenger whose
booking happens to live somewhere else. The prices are the ones you filed or the
ones you return through NDC. The eligibility is yours. The seat map is the real
cabin for that aircraft on that day, not a grid a partner drew once and reuses
for the fleet.

The alternative is not neutral. A partner with no accurate offer either shows
nothing or shows something approximate, and an approximate bag price is worse
for you than no bag price at all. It sets an expectation you then have to honour
or refuse in front of the passenger.

**Insight:** An indirect booking is not a lower-value passenger. It is the same person, in
the same seat, who was never shown the offer. The gap is in where your offer can
reach, not in who is willing to buy.

## Consistency is the part passengers actually notice

A passenger who booked through a partner and later opens your site is comparing
two numbers for the same seat. Where those numbers differ, the lower one becomes
the price and the higher one becomes a complaint. Cross-channel consistency is
not a design preference. It is what stops your own contact centre defending a
figure it did not set.

It runs the other way too. If a partner page shows a row your operation has
blocked, the passenger has bought something somebody now has to unwind, and the
recovery costs more than the ancillary earned.

## Three ways the offer reaches the page

[Diagram: A tag manager drop-in launches fastest and gives you the least control over the experience, a hosted page sits in the middle on both counts, and the API gives you the most control for the most build effort. All three reach the same cart.]

The same cart, reached three ways. How much of the experience you own is your decision, not ours.

On your own manage-booking page, a tag manager rollout is the fastest way to put
a real number against the window without taking an engineering slot. A hosted
page suits a partner with no capacity to build anything. The API suits a carrier
that wants the cart inside its own app and its own design system. The
[platform overview](/platform) sets out what each one costs you in effort and
returns in control.

## Post-booking is a gap in the direct channel too

Direct merchandising is tuned for the sixty seconds before payment. Almost
nothing is tuned for the eleven weeks after it, and that is the window in which
the trip becomes real. Manage booking is the most visited page you own that is
not trying to sell anything.

Two things move in your favour in that window. The fare comparison is over, so
the seat is judged on whether it is worth the money rather than on whether it
inflates a total the passenger is still shopping around. And the passenger's own
plans have firmed up: a connection that looked fine at booking looks long once
the meeting time is fixed.

Run the arithmetic on your own traffic rather than on anyone else's. Take a
quarter of indirect passengers, assume a share of them add a bag, and put your
own filed bag price against it. The figure is illustrative and every input is
already yours. The point is the denominator: passengers you are already flying,
with no post-booking offer in front of them.

## What else belongs in the window

Seat selection, extra bags, refund protection, and priority support are sold and
fulfilled through the cart today. The wider catalogue is where the window gets
more interesting for a carrier. Lounge access reads differently against a four
hour connection than it does during fare comparison. A cabin upgrade sits
naturally at the moment a passenger works out how long the flight will actually
feel. Connectivity is a destination purchase rather than a flight purchase.
Those are categories the platform is built to carry rather than a price list, so
the honest next step for any of them is a conversation. The
[catalogue](/platform/catalogue) sets out what sits where.

## See your own offer set on a channel it does not reach today

Bring one itinerary from a channel where your merchandising currently stops at the fare, and we will load it in front of you.

[Talk to us](mailto:hello@departcart.com)

## Frequently asked questions

### Does this compete with our own direct channel?

It runs the other way round. The cart carries your offer into channels your own experience never reaches, and on your own manage-booking page it fills a window that is informational today. The passenger is one you are already carrying either way.

### Whose prices does the traveller see?

Yours. Offers are drawn for that specific itinerary through ATPCO filed content and NDC, rather than from a table a partner built once and forgot. A price you never published is the fastest way to turn a sale into a contact centre call.

### We do not want every ancillary distributed into every channel. Is that controllable?

Offer set is a commercial decision and it is made per channel. Which products appear, in which markets, and against which fare families is something you decide up front rather than something the integration assumes on your behalf.

### Does anything change inside our reservation system?

No. The cart runs after the booking exists, and the purchase is reflected on the reservation without anyone rekeying it. Your booking flow, your fare logic, your revenue management inputs, and your servicing tools are untouched.

### How would we judge whether the offers are actually relevant?

Load one of your own itineraries and look at what comes back. A seat map that matches the aircraft operating that day, and bag prices that match what you filed for that market, are checkable in about a minute. Relevance is what decides attach rate.