Engineering and construction firm Bechtel Corp. has put together a pilot for New Distribution Capability bookings on United Airlines in close cooperation with SAP Concur and travel management company FCM, which manager of global travel David Weaver said now is ready for broader rollout.
Bechtel's "hard but satisfying" NDC project has been several years in the making, beginning with one-on-one meetings with Concur, United and Bechtel's TMC at the time, which Weaver declined to identify. The company tried to answer the question of "why can't I get the same experience through the corporate program that they get through airline direct," Weaver said during an education session at the Global Business Travel Association annual convention in August. Frustrations with EDIFACT bookings included travelers' status not being recognized, leading those travelers to book seats opened up by their status directly with the airline.
Three months into the project work, near the point of starting the pilot, Bechtel's former TMC decided to pull out, which meant Weaver had to find another TMC partner. With a request for information that included a technical review and a swath of distribution-related questions, a "major TMC" dropped out early in the process, which Weaver said was a "good thing."
"It narrowed things down to who was serious enough to go on this path," he said. "We needed parties with the same goals."
Ultimately, FCM came aboard as the TMC partner for the project. Bechtel also selected Travelfusion as the aggregator, as it was further ahead on NDC compared with global distribution systems, though the latter are "catching up," Weaver said.
For the initial pilot, Bechtel decided to focus on two bundles for travelers offered for booking through Concur's online booking tool: one with airfare and a checked bag and one with airfare and Wi-Fi, Weaver said. He looked for a cross-section of company travelers and bookers to participate, and all who were asked said yes.
Servicing and duty of care were two of the key initial challenges. For servicing changes and reissues in the initial phase, Bechtel is having travelers go through United's website now rather than the TMC. Duty of care has a more complex process, with United sending the booking data back to Concur, which codes a passive segment to Sabre, allowing FCM to direct it to the duty-of-care provider.
"The process is there," Weaver said. "It needs to be more efficient, but it satisfies the requirements."
There have been smaller obstacles to overcome, such as ensuring travelers knew how to access Wi-Fi once aboard if they had purchased it in a bundle.
"When there's a fare in Concur that includes Wi-Fi, there's an activation code," United managing director of digital sales Anthony Toth said. "It's all those little details that have to be communicated in a pilot."
Now that Bechtel is about a year into the pilot, it's ready to move to the next phase, which will aim to enable NDC bookings for offline bookings as well. That likely will tap into capabilities of travel content aggregator TPConnects, in which FCM parent company Flight Centre Travel Group is a majority investor. The aim is to fill in gaps in servicing.
"Generally, all our clients want the travel agency to be involved in the servicing, not having to call the airline," FCM Consulting air practice lead Florian Mueller said.
The debut of Concur's new booking experience also likely will help move the project forward, Weaver said.
In the meantime, Bechtel's project demonstrates the complexity in setting up NDC bookings and the need to get the right partners on board. It's one that more travel managers will face as NDC fragments the distribution landscape, SAP Concur director of distribution and NDC Tom Wilkinson said.
"The days of working with a single point-of-sale aggregation tool to get all the content your travelers need globally is gone," Wilkinson said.
That solution, however, will have a different look for different travel programs.
"There's no product off the shelf that delivers this, so we have to use current tools," Weaver said. "The [old] ecosystem is linear, but the one we are moving to is not, and there's no one perfect configuration."