Ten years after the International Air Transport Association introduced its New Distribution Capability standards for web-based protocols to sell airline products, corporate travel bookings using those protocols remain a drop in the bucket. Including leisure bookings, NDC’s penetration of indirect distribution for IATA member airlines in the quarter ending in March was 10 percent, driven…
The Travel and Tourism Advisory Board of the U.S. Commerce Department is attempting to collaborate with other U.S. federal agencies to spur development of standards and digital interoperability for traveler documentation of Covid-19 vaccinations and test results. On Wednesday, TTAB chair and CWT president and CEO Kurt Ekert outlined the effort’s goals and challenges during…
Last year, business travel professionals talked a lot about the fees that travel management companies charge their corporate clients — some saying they needed to evolve. The discussion continued into 2021, including via a new report from The BTA in the United Kingdom. Like many of last year’s conversations, the report didn’t say a lot…
Covid-19 vaccinations are underway, and the light from the end of the tunnel is around the corner. Between here and there lies much work for employers struggling with how to build workforce immunity. Travel managers are in the thick of it. Should companies mandate vaccinations where and when they’re available to employees? What about specifically…
An agreement announced this week between Lufthansa Group and Sabre, parties with a contentious and litigious shared history, implied a mutually beneficial path forward for airlines and global distribution systems. However, there are many unknowns, and not everyone will be a winner. If Lufthansa and Sabre can agree on GDS distribution of ancillary services and…
There’s a line of thinking that says the pandemic is widening a gap between Amadeus and its key rivals, Sabre and Travelport. Not only was Amadeus already using more modern infrastructure, the theory says, but it also genuinely bought into XML-based distribution and related NDC protocols sooner. These factors position it best with airlines that…
With reaction, assessment and recovery on their minds, corporate travel professionals understandably did not focus closely on airline distribution developments this year. Inasmuch as they did, for some, it was a question of how the relevant systems could help the response to the pandemic — or not. There’s some debate about how soon the usually…
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