Travelport Completes Onboarding of First NDC-connected Travel Agencies
Following the successful implementation of its NDC roadmap during 2018, Travelport, a leading travel commerce platform, on Wednesday announced that it has completed the onboarding of the first group of travel agencies to receive access to New Distribution Capability (NDC) content.
“Our agency customers rely on us to provide them with choice through access to the broadest range of travel content… We’ve taken great care in managing the roll out of our NDC booking capability through Smartpoint to our agency customers,” Travelport’s NDC delivery, Nick Dagg, SVP Global Agency Sales said.
As underlined by Dagg, Travelport collects feedback from its customers as they operate in “this new distribution era” and refines its NDC solution to ensure it provides seamless, integrated travel choice.
In October 2018, UK-based travel agency Meon Valley completed the first live booking using NDC content through Travelport’s Smartpoint desktop. The next phase of Travelport’s NDC roadmap involved onboarding a larger group of travel agencies. To ensure NDC works for all parts of the travel ecosystem, Travelport has implemented its booking solution with a wide variety of agencies of different sizes, including; American Express Global Business Travel, DNATA, Gray Dawes Group, Global Travel Management, Meon Valley Travel, Premier Holidays, TAG, Travel Counsellors and Travel & Transport Statesman.
“Having access to NDC content as soon as possible was of vital importance to us and our travelers so we were pleased to have been part of the initial group of NDC-connected agencies through Travelport Smartpoint,” Mervyn Williamson, Managing Director, Travel and Transport Statesman said.
Travelport recently shared insights from the first phase of implementation of its NDC booking solution, as part of its commitment to ensure NDC works for all parts of the travel industry. These learnings highlighted the importance of agent familiarity, workflow integration, a considered roadmap, the demand for NDC content and the need for broad industry collaboration.
Following the successful onboarding of the current agency partners Travelport will continue to refine its NDC booking solutions. Travelport will follow up with further Smartpoint enhancements along with an API NDC connection channel through Travelport’s Trip Service API mid-year.