Travelport Maps Out The Future
Travelport has unveiled its product roadmap to extend its content offering to airline customers using IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard; and enabling travel agency customers to access such content via Travelport’s platform.
In December 2017, Travelport was the first, and is still the only, GDS operator to achieve IATA’s highest certification as an NDC Level 3 Aggregator. The company is now consolidating and extending its lead by industrializing its NDC capability and incorporating NDC content within its suite of products for airlines and travel agencies.
The products will allow travel agencies to connect through Travelport’s platform in a single workflow combining traditional content and new NDC content. They will be enhanced and optimiszed continuously based on the evaluation of users and customers.
Travelport plans to include NDC content within an initial set of products as follows:
- An industrialized connection for airlines that connects via NDC-standard APIs
- A Point of Sale companion application for travel agencies that offers NDC-enabled content alongside the GDS workflow in the Travelport Smartpoint desktop.
- Shortly afterwards a first fully integrated search, book and manage function, combining NDC-connected content and GDS content in the same workflow, will be offered to travel agency customers on the latest Travelport solutions, including Travelport’s next generation API Trip Services.
- This integrated display and search response will be the foundation for all future releases, both through API and desktop.
The NDC-enabled content will augment already extensive API content within Travelport’s airline Merchandising Suite.
Travelport already connects to 24 airlines through APIs and expects to announce the first of many NDC-enabled airline partnerships very soon.
NDC integration is being developed in collaboration with a select number of agents and airlines who are providing continuous feedback as launch approaches.
Go to https://www.travelport.com for more.
