How AmTrav stays ahead of the curve with NDC

Being the biggest buzzword over the last year, NDC (New Distribution Capability) has the potential to deliver new benefits to the travel industry by unlocking more value for the traveler and generating more business for Travel Management Companies (TMCs). Though it is part of a broader digitalization trend, for NDC to truly take off, the entire travel industry needs to work collaboratively to ensure NDC is deployed on a large scale and adopted worldwide.

From the beginning, we’ve considered AmTrav to be a more modern version of a TMC, offering a lot more content than our competitors, especially when it comes to air shopping. We saw that when travelers visited an airline site, they were bombarded with multiple options for different fares or search results that weren’t available through most of the distribution platforms in booking tools. This led us to build our proprietary technology platform in-house to make the online air shopping journey simple for travel arrangers and the CXO-level consumer.

While the industry was waiting for NDC to come along, we decided to tap into all the rich content available and integrate and display it in our own platform in a way that is very similar to NDC. Travelers coming to our site can search fares and airline offers and at a glance see what amenities are available on each flight along with any extra fees. It wasn’t easy, but it clearly provides real value by helping the traveler make the right choice. 

Having said that, I feel NDC can help bridge the current content gap between corporate and consumer booking tools and airline websites. NDC may be in its infancy, but the potential is there, and Amadeus is making great progress in this area by branching out and creating a new workflow for NDC and taking an API-first approach that accelerates digital transformation. 

Initially, it was Amadeus’ progressive approach to search and shopping technology, allowing it to get ahead of the game and build some great solutions for online travel agencies, that got us working together some 10-15 years ago. However, it’s what Amadeus is doing now with the Live Travel Space to enable connections to content from many different sources, including NDC, that’s really impressed me. Amadeus is doing a great service to those of us who are redistributing the airline tickets.

The industry itself is rapidly changing in important ways and I have a lot of confidence in Amadeus to make the right changes and to do what needs to be done.