Amadeus announced last week that it has started conducting live NDC bookings since last November, through a newly established global partnership with online travel agency, Travix.
Travix is considered one of Amadeus’ “driver customers” for its NDC-enabled Web Services solution, which the GDS intends to roll out later this year. The NDC content sits alongside traditional EDIFACT content, and can be found through one search and is displayed in an aggregated way to allow for easy comparison.
Currently, Travix is distributing NDC content in Germany, The Netherlands and Switzerland.
The partnership also provides Travix’s online websites and travel operators in over 50 markets with access to content aggregated on the Amadeus Travel Platform.
Ludo Verheggen, director of global air content adoption strategy, Amadeus Travel Channels, explained, “You could say that 2018 was the year of building our NDC-enabled solutions and 2019 is the year for deployment… we’re open for business and this year, or by 2020, we expect to see volumes pick up. From there we will further fine tune the solution to answer the needs of the market.”
“We started the NDC-X programme at the beginning of 2018, to bring all our NDC-related activities together… Travix has been our driver customer for our new web services, and actively involved in building the definition of [this] service… it’s the first one to go live with [NDC bookings],” he added.
The next steps for the Amadeus and Travix partnership will be to drive and scale the solution further across multiple airlines, as well as figure out how it can leverage richer content to improve merchandising and personalisation.
“It’s about streamlining [NDC content], scaling it and getting it to be competitive with other sources of content already available,” explained Mieke de Schepper, executive vice president, online travel and managing director, Asia Pacific. “It’s not just proof of concept, it’s a real-life operating solution.”
Since live NDC bookings have been in operation, Amadeus has been working to seamlessly embed NDC content and get it to perform in a similar way and to a similar standard as content from other sources. At the moment, it is too early to tell if there is a marked preference for NDC content.
It’s an optimistic start as the Amadeus and Travix partnership helps to validate the practical application of NDC in an industry setting. However, plenty more must happen before NDC becomes the mainstream industry standard, particularly on the side of airlines, if everyone is to benefit.
“We still haven’t reached a level of true standardisation when it comes to NDC. More than 50 airlines are working with NDC on a global scale… but at the same time, we see there are a lot of different versions being supported and how they’re interpreting the standards, which functionalities are being supported and how certain flows are being implemented,” Verheggen explained. “At the moment, we’re working with airlines to establish a consistent approach, so that agencies can service those bookings in a consistent way.”
In addition to that, performance will also be critical as there is an expectation that NDC content can be delivered and processed at the same speed and same quality standard as traditional GDS content, said de Schepper. “Its really about getting your performance up to a level that can be fully used in a commercial setting… on both the agency and airline side.”
De Schepper added, “as a GDS… we have visibility of [their] requirements, so we can bring both parties to the table to make sure we have their expectations aligned on both sides.”
Lead image: Getty Images
