Travelport to Incorporate NDC Content in Products for Airlines, Travel Agencies

Travelport, a leading travel commerce platform, recently unveiled its product roadmap to extend its content offering to airlines using the International Air Transport Association (IATA) New Distribution Capability (NDC) technology standard.

The GDS operator, which was the first to achieve IATA’s highest certification as an NDC Level 3 Aggregator, said that its plans will enable travel agency customers to access such content via Travelport’s platform.

“Following its achievement as the first GDS to become NDC Level 3 certified as an aggregator, we congratulate Travelport on its continued progress in developing products for this new era and look forward to their initial launch later this year,” Yanik Hoyles, IATA’s Director NDC Program, said. NDC was introduced as a new and innovative approach to the way airlines’ products and services were being distributed.

According to an announcement, the company is now consolidating and extending its lead by industrialising 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 optimised continuously based on the evaluation of users and customers.

Initial NDC products

Travelport 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 in our leading Travelport Smartpoint desktop. This integrated app will be launched from Travelport Smartpoint for ease of use alongside the existing processes and will be ready in the second half of 2018
• 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 industry-leading 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 we approach the launch,” the company said.