Airline sales and distribution platform Mystifly has launched a new air-selling platform with the aim of helping travel sellers, including travel management companies, bridge the gap between legacy and modern air distribution.
Mystifly is not a new company—it began as a travel seller in 2009 and reports "hundreds" of customers, including online travel agencies, wholesalers, fintech companies and closed communities, such as loyalty programs—but its new Smart Selling Platform positions it as "a new animal in the distribution universe," chief marketing officer Susan Carter said. It brings together and normalizes content across hundreds of airlines across sources including global distribution systems, low-cost carriers and New Distribution Capability content and enables selling, servicing and settlement of the content. That can be delivered either via an API or an agent interface.
"There are situations where travel sellers still have agents trained on different systems; they have their main GDS and have to add in other systems to deal with NDC or some LCCs," Carter said. "This platform plugs it all together in a unified workflow not just for shopping and selling but for servicing."
Additionally, the platform has a series of business optimization tools, such as around sourcing or pricing rules, that can be configured for a variety of channels within a seller, she said.
The first announced user of the platform is Costco Travel, a division of global retailer Costco, which is initially using the platform to access and service Hawaiian Airlines NDC through HA Connect. While a leisure use case, it demonstrates how Mystifly can work with TMCs, as Costco is able to set up different channel configurations for its member website and call center. With a TMC, each individual corporate client could be configured as its own channel, or there could even be multiple configurations within a single client.
"It could be a TMC managing 100 corporates," Mystifly founder and CEO Rajeev Kumar said. "The ability to manage each corporate independently with the OBT getting powered through a single API of the TMC is what Mystifly offers."
With the TMC community, Mystifly will be targeting "the lower end of the top tier and the mid-tier" as customers for the end-to-end search to service platform, but larger TMCs also could use just the servicing capabilities, Kumar said.
"The lower end of the top tier and the middle tier cannot wait for the GDSs to solve the problem, and they are not sure whether the GDSs will solve the problem, and hence they need to look at alternatives," he said. "When it comes to the top tier, servicing is a real problem, and we are seeing top-tier TMCs potentially showing a lot of interest in our servicing platform, the ability to change a [British Airways] booking or an American Airlines booking or Hawaiian Airlines booking using a single interface along with the GDS."
Mystifly also is targeting expense management platforms that want to add the ability to include booking within their platform as customers, according to Kumar.
The platform launch comes as Mystifly is in a "ramp up, expansion phase," Carter said. The company also over the past year or so has added several members to its management team, including Carter as well as chief business officer Dennis van Noord, Americas VP Jeremy Jameson, European sales director Helena Torres, head of product Lars Gaebler and head of airline partnerships and payments Eugene Kalatsidis, she said.