Travelport said the vision was a significant departure from the historical GDS terminology and language. Instead it was developed to more closely align with what it now offers the industry, rather than over 40 years ago when it was first developed by airlines and largely concentrated only on basic air transaction processing.

The vision “redefines the way travel is sold by giving travel providers new ways to merchandise their content and travel agencies and corporations more intuitive ways to search, sell and book.”

This evolution is reflected in Travelport’s differentiated content and product offering that now includes:

• eNett payment solutions, which are fully integrated into the travel agent’s desktop and workflows to enable secure, electronic payments between travel agencies and travel providers.
• Enhanced air content distributed through its platform to include fares and ancillary products from low cost carriers as well as network carriers through the same point of sale and workflow management tools. With the addition of Ryanair content at the end of the March 2014, Travelport is now positioned as the only major company in this space to be able to sell content for all of the world’s top 10 airlines.
• Expanded hotel content offering the ability to travel agencies to make real time reservations for more than 580,000 individual hotel properties, again, leading in this space.
• Airline merchandising providing functionality which allows airlines to connect to Travelport, and distribute their ancillary products as well as their fares, through either traditional fare filing methods such as ATPCo, or via XML APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

As part of the brand relaunch, Travelport has also renaming its two main operational areas.

First, its Travel Commerce Platform, including merchandising, reservations, payments and workflow management, which accounted for 95% of its revenue in quarter one this year, and second, its Technology Services business through which it provides critical IT services to airlines for their internal and direct channel use.

The Travel Commerce Platform revenue is further classified according to its source as either Air or Beyond Air. Beyond Air, which includes revenues from hospitality, advertising and payments, now accounts for around 19% of Travelport’s Travel Commerce Platform revenue and continues to grow at a strong pace.

Through Technology Services, Travelport provides systems management and IT services to airlines, most notably Delta, as well as some key component IT solutions for vital airline functions such as shopping, faring, the issuance of accountable documents, interline exchanges and departure control.

On the rationale behind the new vision Gordon Wilson, Travelport president and CEO (pictured above left),  said, “We’ve evolved the way we both distribute content for our travel provider customers and made it more easily accessible and bookable by our travel agency customers. We have invested in, and developed our business to address the changing needs of the travel distribution chain, which we are now articulating through our new, and more up to date, brand proposition that clearly explains what we offer our customers.” (watch the video below).