# Ancillary revenue for OTAs

You sell the flight, then the airline sells the seat and the bag. A post-booking cart on the page you already own keeps that revenue with the OTA.

Ancillary revenue for OTAs comes from the window after the booking confirms. An
OTA that sells the flight on a thin margin can still sell the seat, the extra
bag, and refund protection on its own confirmation page, rather than losing that
spend to the airline site the traveller is sent to next.

[Diagram: An agency sells the flight and earns only a thin fare margin, then the traveller buys the seat and the bag on the airline's own website, so the ancillary revenue leaves the agency entirely. The cause is that the agency has no post-booking cart of its own.]

Where the extras get bought when the OTA has no cart of its own.

## The flight is the loss leader. The extras are the margin.

Everyone in this market knows what air sells for. The comparison is won on price,
the price goes to the floor, and what survives is a booking fee and a thin
commission. The money that makes a trip profitable sits in what the traveller
buys afterwards, and almost none of it reaches the agency that found the
customer.

The handoff is the whole problem. You confirm the booking, you send the traveller
a reference number, and that number is a key to the airline's own manage-booking
page. Every seat, every bag, every extra bought between confirmation and
departure gets bought there. You paid for the click. Somebody else took the
second sale.

## The post-booking window is yours to own

Nothing about the traveller changes at the moment of confirmation except that the
trip stops being hypothetical. That is a better buyer than the one you had five
minutes earlier. The price anchor has gone, the comparison tabs are closed, and
the question has moved from "is this the cheapest option" to "how do I want this
trip to go".

You also hold something the airline does not: the relationship, the email
address, and the reason the traveller came to you in the first place. The only
thing missing is somewhere to put the offer.

**Insight:** The traveller who refused to pay for a seat during checkout is the same person
who will pay for one an hour later. You are not persuading a different customer.
You are asking at a different moment.

## What actually moves attach rate

[Diagram: An attach rate funnel narrows from every booking, to the travellers who are shown a relevant offer, to the smaller group who buy one. The proportions drawn here are round placeholders chosen to explain the shape, not measured results, and no customer attach rate is published.]

Every booking is the top of the funnel. Relevance decides the middle.

Four decisions do most of the work, and none of them is a design flourish.

**Relevance.** Show only what is valid for that itinerary. A seat map for the
wrong cabin layout, or a bag price the airline never filed, costs you the sale
and earns you a support contact.

**Timing.** The strongest moment is immediately after confirmation. The second
strongest is the week before departure, when the trip becomes real again. One
reminder is merchandising. Four is a complaint.

**Order.** Lead with the item the traveller was already thinking about. On a long
haul that is usually the seat. On a low-cost carrier it is usually the bag.

**Presentation.** One cart, one payment, one confirmation. Every step between
wanting the thing and having it is a place to lose the sale.

Run the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than on anyone else's. Take a month
of ten thousand air bookings. If one traveller in twenty adds a bag at thirty
dollars, that is five hundred bags and fifteen thousand dollars of gross sales,
on traffic you have already paid to acquire. Halve the assumption if you think it
is optimistic. The figure is illustrative and the inputs are all yours already.

| Moment | Who owns the page | What the traveller is weighing | Who collects the extra |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Fare search | You | Your total against three other tabs | Nobody yet |
| Your checkout | You | The fare plus every add-on at once | You, if they say yes |
| After confirmation, today | The airline, by default | Nothing. The trip is booked | The airline |
| After confirmation, with a cart | You | How they want the trip to go | You |

## What it takes to put a cart on a page you already have

1. **Pick the page**

   You already have one. It is the confirmation page, the itinerary page, or the manage-booking view you send people to. It does not need rebuilding. It needs something to sell.

2. **Choose how deep you go**

   A tag manager rollout needs no release from your engineering team and can be switched off as fast as it was switched on. A hosted page gives you more control of the experience. The API gives you all of it. The [platform overview](/platform) sets out the trade between effort and control.

3. **Decide the offer set**

   Which products, in what order, at which moment, and in which markets. That is a commercial decision rather than an engineering one, which is why it is worth making deliberately instead of shipping a default.

4. **Measure, then widen**

   Start on one route group or one point of sale, read the attach numbers against a period you can compare to, then widen. Proving the revenue first also settles the internal argument about the roadmap slot.

## It sits beside your checkout, not in front of it

[Diagram: DepartCart sits between the partner's existing post-booking experience and the reservation, adding relevant offers, a cart and a single payment. The partner keeps the pages and the booking flow it already has, and replatforms nothing.]

The cart attaches to what you already run. Nothing in the booking path moves.

A post-booking cart touches none of the machinery that makes an OTA hard to
change. Your search stays yours. Your fare pricing, your booking flow, your
payment arrangements for air, and your servicing all stay exactly where they are.
The cart runs after all of that has finished, on a page whose only job today is
to display information.

That is why this is not a replatform, and why a first version goes in through a
tag manager in days rather than quarters.

## The catalogue is wider than seats and bags

Seat selection, extra bags, and refund protection are sold and fulfilled through
the cart today. The category does not stop there, and neither does the shape of
the cart. Lounge access reads well against a long connection. Connectivity is a
destination purchase rather than a flight purchase, which is why the window after
booking suits it better than the booking flow does. Ground transport is the point
where an air itinerary stops being air only. Those are categories the platform is
built for rather than a price list, so the honest next step for any of them is a
conversation.

## See it against one of your own bookings

The fastest way to judge a post-booking cart is to watch it load a real itinerary from your own inventory.

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

## Frequently asked questions

### How is this different from selling extras in our booking flow?

The competition is different. During the flow, every add-on is priced against a fare the traveller is still comparing across four tabs. After the booking confirms, the fare decision is settled and the question becomes how the trip should go, so the same offer is judged on its own merits.

### Do we have to replatform or move our checkout?

No. The cart is added to a page you already send travellers to after booking, and it can arrive through your tag manager, as a hosted page, or through the API. Your search, your fare pricing, and your existing checkout are untouched.

### Which bookings does it work with?

Bookings held in Sabre, with ancillaries sourced through both ATPCO filed content and NDC. Seat maps and bag offers come from the airline for that specific itinerary rather than from a generic table, which is what stops a traveller being shown something they cannot actually have.

### What does the traveller see?

A cart in your branding, holding only what is valid for their itinerary. They pay once, and the purchase is written back to the reservation without anyone at your end handling it.

### How do we work out whether it is worth doing?

Take your monthly air bookings, pick an attach assumption you believe, and multiply it by a typical bag or seat price. The traffic is already yours and already paid for, so the arithmetic is about what share of the extras you keep rather than about buying new demand.