Managed travel technology provider and travel management
company Spotnana announced today that the company has enabled travelers to
self-serve cross exchanges for EDIFACT and NDC tickets.
The limitation of holding unused ticket credits for EDIFACT
tickets and not being able to exchange them for NDC tickets, which often offer
savings when compared to EDIFACT, came to a head in April when American
Airlines moved forward with its NDC strategy. The issue left travel programs
with EDIFACT-based American Airlines credits with few options to redeem those
credits for potential NDC savings without subjecting the exchange to agent
services that would incur fees that would erode savings.
American Airlines and Accelya announced
a fix in June, and Spotnana is the first to implement the solution for
clients.
“Spotnana added support for NDC redemptions
of EDIFACT-based flight credits in a matter of weeks,” said AA director of
airline retailing technology Anthony Rader in a statement
Additionally, the company internally has
built a solution for unused NDC ticket exchanges to ensure the capability to
exchange runs both ways. When a booking is canceled, Spotnana automatically
requests unused ticket credit details via its direct NDC API integrations. It
stores the results in its extensible system of record, and associates those credits
with the individual traveler.
“It was very important to us to deliver capabilities for
managing unused tickets for both EDIFACT and NDC fares at the same time,”
Spotnana founder and CEO Sarosh Waghmar wrote in a blog posted this morning. “Wherever
possible, we strive to deliver the same capabilities across all distribution
channels and content sources, so travelers have a consistent experience.”
Travelers Can Self-Serve EDIFACT-NDC
Exchanges
While Spotnana agents can execute such exchanges, Spotnana has
pushed the capability to travelers themselves in the online booking tool.
“We believe travelers should
only reach out to an agent when they want to, and not because technology gaps
leave them no other choice,” Waghmar wrote in the blog, characterizing the
technical exercise of surfacing ticket credit sources into the live booking
process as “trivial” once the exchange capabilities and data availability were
in place.
An individual’s credits are displayed at the
time of booking and can be selected to apply to a booking or deselected for
later use.
Spotnana’s self-booking tool and agent tools operate
on the same platform, giving both parties real-time visibility to trip details
and changes. The Spotnana booking engine automates the exchange workflow,
including communication with the airline.
The EDIFACT-NDC ticket exchange capability
joins other self-serve exchange capabilities on the Spotnana platform,
including multiple exchanges of the same flight, exchanges and cancellations of
partially flown flights, exchanges of tickets with a pending upgrade, and the
ability for a traveler to cancel a flight and choose either an unused ticket
credit or a refund if the amounts differ, according to Waghmar.