# The post-booking ancillary catalogue Seats and bags are where a post-booking cart starts. The catalogue reaches across lounges, insurance, connectivity, ground transport, and cabin upgrades. A post-booking cart is not a seat-selling tool that happens to carry other things. It is a merchandising surface, and the interesting question is not which single product earns the most. It is which second product a traveller adds once they have already bought the first. The travel ancillary catalogue covers everything a traveller might buy between booking and departure: seats, bags, lounge access, insurance, connectivity, ground transport, and cabin upgrades. Every category follows the same offer, pay, and confirm shape. What changes between them is eligibility, who sets the price, and how early the traveller will decide. ## What sits in the cart today Four products are live, sold, and written back to the reservation. They are the ones with the shortest path from offer to confirmation, and between them they cover the two things almost every traveller thinks about after booking: where they will sit and what they can bring. [Diagram: Four ancillaries are sold and fulfilled through the cart today, and the wider catalogue shows the shape of what the same cart is built to carry. The outlined items are categories the platform is built for, not products on sale.] Solid items are shipped today. The rest is the shape the cart is built to carry. Seat selection is the anchor. Extra bags are the highest-intent purchase, because the traveller has usually just started thinking about packing. Refund protection speaks to the moment a large non-refundable amount has just left an account. Priority support turns a servicing cost into a revenue line. ## The categories, and how each one behaves The rest of the catalogue is where a post-booking cart stops being a seat tool. Each of these categories has its own economics, and the differences matter more than the similarities. | Category | Decided | Price set by | Typical value | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Seat selection | Soon after booking | The airline | Low, very high attach | | Extra bags | Close to departure | The airline | Medium | | Lounge access | Close to departure | The lounge operator | Medium | | Travel insurance | Soon after booking | The underwriter | Medium | | Cabin upgrades | Any time | The airline | High | | Connectivity | Days before travel | The network | Low | | Ground transport | Days before travel | The operator | Medium | | Carbon offset | Any time | The scheme | Very low | ### Lounge access A natural second item. The traveller has committed to the trip, and a long connection is exactly the situation where a lounge is worth paying for. The merchandising logic is unusual in that relevance depends almost entirely on the itinerary rather than on the traveller: a four hour layover sells it, a forty minute connection never will. ### Travel insurance and disruption cover These two speak to the same anxiety from different directions. Insurance covers the trip, disruption cover covers the journey. Both are regulated categories with eligibility that varies by itinerary, residency, and departure date, which makes them the categories where getting the offer wrong is most expensive. ### Connectivity An eSIM is a destination product rather than a flight product. That is precisely why the post-booking window suits it better than the booking flow does: nobody is thinking about roaming while comparing fares, and almost everybody thinks about it the week before they leave. ### Cabin upgrades The highest value single item in the catalogue, and the one most sensitive to timing. An upgrade offered at the wrong moment reads as an upsell. The same upgrade offered once the traveller has started planning the trip reads as an opportunity. ### Ground transport Where the catalogue stops being air only. A transfer attaches to an itinerary, not to a flight, which is the clearest bridge from air into rail, cruise, and tour bookings that have exactly the same post-booking gap and far fewer vendors paying attention to it. ### Carbon offset, meals, wifi, and baggage protection Low revenue per sale, and worth carrying anyway. Offsets buy brand credit that is hard to obtain elsewhere. Meals and wifi are long haul products with genuine demand. Baggage protection pairs naturally with an extra bag, which makes it a bundling opportunity rather than a standalone sale. ## Why breadth changes the arithmetic The instinct is to add the highest value category first. Attach behaviour argues for the opposite. **Insight:** A cart with two relevant items usually outperforms a cart with one high value item, because relevance is per traveller and no single category is relevant to everybody. Breadth is what raises the share of travellers who see anything worth buying at all. Consider a hundred travellers. If one category is relevant to thirty of them, the ceiling is thirty offers, however good that category is. Four categories that each reach thirty different travellers do not reach a hundred and twenty people, but they do reach far more than thirty, and the travellers in the overlap are the ones who buy twice. That is the argument for a catalogue rather than a product: not that every category earns well, but that every category raises the odds that a given traveller finds one thing worth buying. ## One cart, one payment, one confirmation The reason breadth is practical at all is that the categories differ commercially and not structurally. Every one of them is the same shape underneath: work out what this specific itinerary is eligible for, present it at a moment the traveller is receptive, take a single payment, and make sure the booking reflects what was bought. **Aside:** That shared shape is why adding a category is a commercial and contractual question rather than an engineering one, and why the interesting conversations about the catalogue are usually about which supplier and which market, not about how it would work. ## Tell us which categories matter in your market The right catalogue depends on who your travellers are and where they fly. That is a conversation worth having early. [Talk to us](mailto:hello@departcart.com) ## Frequently asked questions ### Which products sit in the cart today? Seat selection, extra bags, refund protection, and priority support are sold and written back to the reservation. The diagram on this page marks them as solid, and marks the wider catalogue separately. ### Why does the catalogue matter if most revenue is seats and bags? Because attach rate compounds. A traveller who has already bought one thing in a cart is far more likely to buy a second, and the second item is usually from a different category than the first. ### Does every category work the same way? Structurally yes, commercially no. Every category follows the same offer, pay, and confirm shape. What differs is eligibility, who sets the price, and how far ahead of departure the traveller is willing to decide. ### Is this only for airlines and flights? No. Ground transport, insurance, and connectivity are itinerary products rather than flight products, which is what makes the same cart sensible for rail, cruise, and tour bookings.