Amadeus is making NDC-enabled content available around the world in 2021.
For years now, the travel industry has been talking abouthow NDC would transform digital retailing, but what does innovation in digital retailing even look like for the travel industry? How can travel retailing be made as easy, personalized, and rewarding as Netflix was for film and TV, or Amazon was for books?
That’s something Amadeus and its industry partners have been exploring for a while now. NDC is an open innovation playing field. It is enabling the industry to anticipate traveler needs so that we can tailor their experience to serve them better.
Amadeus is pioneering several technological breakthroughs on NDC. More than twenty innovative technical solutions are being patented as part of this process. For now, seven patents have already been granted in the US and six in France, all of them in the last twelve months.
These patents are a recognition of the constant innovation and collaborative effort that goes on at Amadeus to accelerate NDC adoption in our industry. The technology and processes targeted with these patents cover both the aim to simplify the transition process as well as the objective to facilitate increasing benefits for travel agents, airlines, corporations, and the overall travel industry.
Here are three ways where we see that technology is accelerating NDC adoption and promoting innovation in digital travel retailing:
1. Making NDC integration as seamless as can be
The beauty of NDC is that each airline can design its own booking flows to better deliver its unique value proposition, and tailor its offers for individual travelers. However, to unlock NDC’s full potential, airlines’ solutions still need to fit correctly within the travel sellers’ environment.
To make NDC more accessible to travel sellers and travelers, we have decided to normalize each airline’s unique NDC fingerprint into one streamlined interface and booking process. Since each airline may have its specific way of doing things, integrating NDC APIs is no easy task.
This normalization requires a lot of heavy lifting, and this is where Amadeus technology comes into play.Thanks to years of industry consultation and experimentation, Amadeus has found a unique way to unify various types of NDC-enabled content from all kinds of different airlines into one simple interface and display.
This means travel sellers can easily search, compare, book, and manage not only different airlines’ NDC-enabled content but other content as well in the same way as before – with full end-to-end integration – all on one screen. Amadeus manages the complexity of NDC integration behind the scenes on behalf of our travel seller customers so that they can focus on their business.
Powering this is the Amadeus Travel Platform, which has been designed as a one-stop-shop solution capable of managing airline content sourced through NDC or EDIFACT alongside LCC and non-air. Thanks to the innovative underlying reservation process, a travel seller front-office does not need to be heavily modified to handle all the different content sources.
Among all these different content sources, it is important that NDC-enabled content stands out so that it is not overlooked and travel sellers can benefit. That is why Amadeus has created a patented solution that clearly identifies content sourced through NDC with a badge, making it easily identifiable for travel sellers – this is key to push adoption.
2. Diversifying offer selection and booking without the added CPU (core processing unit) weight
NDC is growing at scale, and transactional traffic is expected to grow in tandem for airlines. This can cause a real strain on some airline systems, which need to be able to deal with the exponential growth in shopping traffic. To help airlines deal with this challenge, Amadeus has developed a unique technology that allows both airlines and travel sellers to retain the characteristics of an offer without having to store it. In addition, our technology also enables airlines to personalize their offers more efficiently, allowing them to reuse a large share of existing processes to generate new offers.
All of this gives airlines and travel sellers valuable system capacity, to innovate and continue creating new offers without worrying about the load on their systems.
3.Taking the stress out of disruption
When changes in external conditions mean that a booking or a flight needs to be updated, there is no time to waste. Travelers need to be assured that airlines and travel agents act swiftly to get them to wherever they need to be. That is why Amadeus has developed a unique technology to improve queue management for NDC-enabled bookings. This allows travel sellers to get real-time notifications through NDC from airlines in case of a disruption, such as a changed schedule, so travel agents can react instantly. In addition, Amadeus technology will capture the NDC message and synchronize seller’s booking record with that of the airline system, so there is no de-synchronization on either side if a change is made.
NDC is an innovation playground
By ramping up NDC experimentation and testing, we all stand to benefit.
"With NDC, the travel industry can improve digital retailing for a better travel experience. Amadeus is fully committed to innovation and cutting-edge technology – to meet the industry’s needs for better flexibility, agility, and servicing. NDC is now forming a core part of this journey as it delivers on all of these." - Rodolphe Texier, Senior Expert NDC, Amadeus
Our engineers and developers are working relentlessly to bring NDC to scale, solve new challenges, and unlock NDC potential. Over the coming months and years, more breakthroughs are certain to push the limits of what is possible in NDC and travel retailing.
The transition will take time – NDC is not a sprint but a marathon. It represents a big shift in the way the travel industry has been working, and we can’t wait to see the possibilities to innovate further that lie ahead.
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