Two industry heavyweights come together today as Amadeus and Flight Centre announce their strategic partnership to drive progress for compliance with IATAs’ NDC (New Distribution Capability) programme.
The NDC Standard enhances the capability of communications between airlines and travel agents. Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG), one of the largest travel agency groups in the world consisting of more than 40 brands, has announced it’s new partnership with travel-tech giant, Amadeus.
As one of Flight Centre’s partners of choice, Amadeus will be upgrading the travel group’s IT and operations through tech solutions and support expansion. Flight Centre is adopting the Amadeus Selling Platform Connect and a range of integrated mobile and business intelligence and capabilities, to deliver personalised services through its travel agents in 17 countries.
“We wanted a leading technology partner, not just a GDS supplier”
Graham Turner, managing director of Flight Centre Travel Group, said, “Our approach has always been to evolve with industry developments and the needs of our customers in order to aggregate and offer the widest, most relevant content possible.
“We are committed to ensuring Flight Centre stays ahead of the curve in terms of GDS technology and systems, particularly as new initiatives like NDC emerge. That’s why we are excited to have partnered with Amadeus in our Asia and EMEA businesses. We wanted a leading technology partner, not just a GDS supplier, who could work with us to drive our business forward with tech innovation for the benefit of our customers.”
Flight Centre will provide input into Amadeus’ design and build of an NDC-enabled solution. This will enable travel sellers worldwide to shop, order, and pay for flights and related services, in addition to changing and cancelling bookings, using the NDC standard in Amadeus Selling Platform Connect.
This will give consumers a richer choice of fares and the option to book NDC-powered ancillary services within an already familiar working environment.
“We’re also evolving our entire travel platform to bring together all relevant content from any source”
Rajiv Rajian, EVP of business travel at Amadeus, said, “We are proud to be delivering Flight Centre’s distribution and IT needs and we’re excited to have Flight Centre as a driver customer on our NDC journey. As we progress on our NDC-X programme, we’re also evolving our entire travel platform to bring together all relevant content from any source (GDS, NDC, airline proprietary APIs, and aggregators) to be distributed via any channel or device.
“The first evolution of our platform is underway and will give travel sellers, like Flight Centre, access to more content, and will give airlines the flexibility to distribute their products and offers however they choose.”
Amadeus has already started to collaborate with several airlines to define a solution that gives travel agents access to travel content using the NDC standard. The objective is to make its content easy to access and compare, so travel providers and sellers can serve travellers simply, quickly and accurately.
Amadeus’s goal is to achieve the NDC level 3 certification as an aggregator this year, followed by delivering a first fully-scalable solution to travel sellers worldwide in 2019. This will continue to evolve, adding more sophisticated use cases along the way.
The range of Amadeus solutions will be adopted in the following regions: EMEA (United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, South Africa, Namibia, and UAE) and Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and India). In Australia and New Zealand, Amadeus will also provide technology solutions for some of Flight Centre’s online travel agency business.
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