Avianca is to become the first Latin American airline to implement the International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard by participating in Amadeus’ NDC-X programme.
It will adopt the Altéa NDC solution, which Amadeus says will allow the carrier to provide its travel agency and metasearch customers with a more personalised product and rich media capabilities. By implementing the solution, the airline is also able to use different merchandising techniques across all of its channels.
The new agreement falls under the umbrella of Amadeus’ NDC-X programme, which brings together under one roof all the NDC activities across Amadeus, as an IT provider and aggregator.
“Amadeus Altéa NDC will allow us to offer our customers an enriched content of products and services,” said Silvia Mosquera, executive vice-president of sales and marketing at Avianca. “To start with, we will use Amadeus Altéa NDC to make our content available directly on Skyscanner’s desktop and mobile channels. Then we expect to extend the solution to other partners in our ecosystem.”
The Altéa NDC solution enables airlines using Altéa PSS (Passenger Service System) to distribute their offers to third parties using the latest IATA industry standard. Altéa NDC supports end-to-end NDC booking flows and provides offer and order management capabilities.
Avianca will be able to integrate ancillary services into the new NDC booking flow for bookings from travel agencies and metasearch companies, allowing it to upsell products to third parties and ultimately the traveller.
“Our Altéa NDC solution will help Avianca extend its reach,” added Vicky Huertas, commercial vice-president, Airlines Latin America & Caribbean at Amadeus. “We already provide Avianca with a wide range of IT solutions and we’ll now enable its omni-channel approach with Altéa NDC. This will allow Avianca’s content to be available via NDC XML connectivity to meta-search engines, travel agencies, and technology providers.”
Avianca serves more than 108 destinations in 26 countries in America and Europe with a current fleet of over 180 short, medium and long-range aircraft.
Written by: Mark Thomas
If you have any feedback about this article or would like to suggest a topic for future investigation, please contact us.
