Travelfusion

Ninety-Nine (NDC) Problems And The Tweaks Aren’t Done

Airline officials and other proponents of the New Distribution Capability have described its servicing challenges as “edge cases,” but travel management companies are finding more than that. Limitations on exchanges and unused ticket tracking are the most crucial on growing lists of issues. It’s no wonder that, by most accounts, corporate adoption of American’s NDC…

SAP Concur Builds To Latest NDC Version, ‘Protects’ Clients With Alternatives

[CORRECTION, Feb. 10, 2023: This article was significantly revised to eliminate misunderstandings about compatibility between different versions of NDC APIs.] SAP Concur said Thursday that its plan for next-generation airline connectivity centered on the 21.3 version of the International Air Transport Association’s NDC schema. Work would be completed no sooner than this summer, according to…

Sabre, TMCs Advance AA NDC Testing

After some initial tests of basic functionality late last year, Sabre and several travel management companies last week started an “expanded pilot” to support fares coming through American Airlines’ NDC-compliant application programming interface. Corporate travel buyers are keen to see progress as they contemplate potentially unwelcome consequences of American’s plan in nine weeks to pull…

American Airlines Finds Fans, Foes Of Distribution Plan (Audio)

Airline industry folks including a top consultant and tech provider saw American Airlines’ distribution strategy revealed Monday as progress. Corporate travel management company leaders? Not as much.  “This AA announcement appears to remove current content, in the name of NDC, while also limiting other content, which brings confusion to the booking process,” according to a…

Expecting More Non-GDS Fares, Air Canada To Launch Tool For Travel Agencies To Service Direct Bookings And Access NDC

Air Canada 18 years ago debuted fare families, a response to low-cost competition that set off a revolution in airline pricing. The company’s decision shortly thereafter to make some fares exclusive to its direct channels augured similar moves more than a decade later by big carriers in Europe and elsewhere. Is Montréal changing the game…

Ryanair’s Dispute With Screen Scrapers Entangles Corporate Travelers

Ryanair has withheld services from corporate travelers who used third-party aggregation systems such as Travelfusion to book tickets, according to sources. These passengers found themselves entangled by Ryanair’s long-running fight against “screen scrapers,” online services that scan airline websites for fares and inventory that they or partners can resell. Handling bookings coming in via Travelfusion…

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