Travelport extends its content offering for the mixed-economy era of airline distribution

21 February, 2018

Travel commerce platform Travelport has detailed its product roadmap to extend its content offering to airline customers using the International Air Transport Association (IATA) New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard. This will enable travel agency customers to access such content via Travelport's platform.

In Dec-2017 Travelport was the first, and is still the only, GDS operator to achieve IATA's highest certification as an NDC Level 3 Aggregator and is now consolidating and extending its position by industrialising its NDC capability and incorporating NDC content within its suite of products for airlines and travel agencies.

These 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 optimised continuously based on the evaluation of users and customers, says the company. It plans to include NDC content within an initial set of products as follows:

  • An industrialised 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 of its Smartpoint desktop for launch in the second half of 2018
  • A subsequent 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 its API Trip Services

This integrated display and search response will be the foundation for all future releases, both through API and desktop with the NDC-enabled content augmenting the already extensive API content within Travelport's airline merchandising suite.

The company says NDC integration is being developed in collaboration with "a select number of agents and airlines" who are "providing continuous feedback" as it approaches the launch. This group includes major agencies such as Travix and BidTravel and should help enable Travelport to ensure its NDC integration serves the needs of all stakeholders as the product suite evolves.

Travelport already connects to 24 airlines through APIs and is expected to announce the first of many NDC-enabled airline partnerships in the coming months.