Air Canada begins new way to distribute fares to partners

The airline industry has talked a lot about how it can use new distribution capabilities to embrace novel ways of retailing airfares to corporate and leisure travellers. For a glimpse at what may come, look to Air Canada, which this week processed its first transaction via a new platform called NDC Exchange. For several years now, Air Canada has offered internet-based connections for online travel agencies and travel management companies to access its airfares. These worked outside of the incumbent three giants of travel distribution, Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport. About 40 to 50 agencies access Air Canada’s application programming interfaces, or APIs, to process about a million tickets a year via direct connections that avoid the intermediaries. This year, Air Canada will generate approximately $600m in revenue via these APIs. That’s still a minority of Air Canada’s overall distribution mix. But it avoids the fees those middlemen charge and it enables the airline to have enhanced control over how the content appears on travel agency reservation systems to make sure they’re presenting their full-service products in the best way and not encouraging customers to shop by lowest price. In recent years, Air Canada and other airline industry players have gradually adopted new technical standards for their APIs that have been championed by the IATA. Last week, Air Canada was the first airline to announce it was adopting a new, third way. It began using NDC Exchange, a platform that does the work on Air Canada’s behalf to transform data from its web services into a way that’s readable by sellers using any of the different versions of New Distribution Capability.<br/>