Pioneering the development of NDC connections
Before you start reading this, we suggest you give a quick read over Matthew Steer’s overview post about IATA’s NDC initiative: https://medium.com/travel-cloud/why-iatas-ndc-is-important-eefa8f4710dc
At Click Travel we’re enthusiastic about developing new technologies and utilising the latest APIs in order to best serve our business travel clients. As an award-winning technology(1) and travel management company(2), we have developed Travel.Cloud as a collection of micro-services, making heavy use of Amazon’s various tools in the AWS platform.
Preferring to be ahead of the curve, Click Travel was the first TMC to be accredited at level 3 of NDC with IATA (3), and were one of the first to connect to British Airways and offer content though their NDC connection rather than through the GDS, which put us in a strong position when British Airways began filing cheaper fares on the system as we avoid being charged as a result of the fee on bookings made through GDS introduced in October 2017.
We’ve also worked together with British Airways and IATA in order to help develop new endpoints and messages on the latest NDC schema(4).
Our engineering department is set up in a manner that we empower each team with the ability to implementing new features, without requiring involvement from other teams (and consequently impacting their workload). This has helped us avoid building a monolithic system — as everything is neatly compartmentalised by design — which meant that when the Flights team decided to take on the task of being the first TMC to implement pre-booking of seats through British Airways’ NDC connection, they were able to do so quickly, and without stepping on anyone’s toes (or backlogs).
In total, the development of this feature took three developers three weeks of development time, with a test connection ready in week two, and the live connection ready in week three.
As per IATA’s hopes for building NDC connections, the bottleneck of waiting for responses from GDS has been removed thanks to TMCs and airlines now having the ability to talk to each other directly: British Airways have been very responsive whenever issues have arisen.
Also thanks to NDC, we can provide content directly to our clients, which reduces the amount of manual work either we or the airline has to cope with in order to provide additions (such as baggage etc.) on a booking.
Pioneering NDC connections has put Click Travel in an industry-leading position both in terms of customer-facing products and in our ability to develop the NDC API with IATA and individual airlines, allowing us to help roadmap an exciting future for airline content-delivery.
As of the 25th of June 2018, travel.cloud users have been able to book seats on British Airways through their NDC connection, and we’re looking forward to adding more features in the near future.
Further Reading:
(1) https://www.clicktravel.com/blog/click-crowned-large-tech-company-year-birmingham-tech-awards/
(2) https://www.clicktravel.com/blog/click-travel-wins-two-key-awards-at-the-business-travel-awards/
(4) Robin Smith Chief Product Engineer at Click Travel spoke at IATA’s AIR Business Travel Summit, June 2018 http://www.iata.org/events/Documents/ibts18-program.pdf
