Airline NDC Solution
The core issue underlying NDC is that many airlines want the capability to market and differentiate their product effectively. Airlines are no longer only selling the convenience of travelling from A to B, but they must also get involved in the selling of a total travel experience. Here's the difference:
Convenience - travel from A to B. This requires delivery of schedules, seat availability, and pricing to the customer, as well as airport related functionality such as check-in, luggage tracking and special services delivery. This exists today through the GDSs.
Travel Experience - this requires delivery of rich dynamic content about route to airport, airport services, seat amenities, and on board services. Everything matters; from Wi-Fi at the gate to faster service at the check-in counter. This capability allows the passenger to customize his/her travel experience. The airline can unbundle its pricing, show which services are included in the fare and promote ancillary offers.
Airline web sites offer this capability to the passengers, however traditional GDSs do not support these functionalities. NDC is the standard allowing the end user to engage and benefit from a uniform display and distribution of the airlines’ product offering.
Following IATA’s initiatives, the NDC business requirements have been defined through taskforces, facilitating focus groups among a large number of professionals from a wide range of industry stakeholders. The NDC standard (IATA resolution 787) has been approved by the DoT, on the 6th of August, 2014.
Relevant links:
- Everything you wanted to know about NDC
- Video of IATA New Distribution Capability Program
- If you want to help click here and join us!
For further information, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Phase 1 – Focusing on the passenger
We rely on airlines’ web services and PSS data feeds to transition into a passenger-centric model. JR Technologies will host airlines’ sales on the NDC Platform without the need for the carrier to manage Order IDs on its PSS. A full suite of Offer and Order Management systems is available, along with tools facilitating integration with Revenue Accounting and Departure Control Systems.
Phase 2 – Customized solutions
We decouple pricing from airlines’ web services, relying on an availability cache (or mirroring depending on the environment) and our own fare cache to return pricing. At this stage the pricing engine integrates with the merchandising engine and CRM to return a dynamic bundle and/or dynamic price. Airlines can also integrate with Revenue Accounting Systems and ERP where needed, as well as airport check-in, Kiosks and crew tablet functions.
Phase 3 – Airline driven continuous improvement
We disengage Revenue Management from the inventory approach; stop relying on RBDs, optimize total income including ancillary revenue, enhance customer segmentation and start forecasting demand for dynamically designed market segments. All aggregators are connected to the NDC Platform; no offers are made outside the airlines’ control.
This module allows the airline to describe its services with rich media, links to its website, and to define business rules that result in a customized offer for every passenger. Bundling and un-bundling of fares and ancillaries is optimized enabling the airline to offer its passengers a wide range of services to choose from. The product is suitable for carriers who want to differentiate their offering based on their merchandizing strategy.
Supports availability caching or mirroring, fare caching, customizable UI for fare management, interpretation of fares and rules, provision for gross and net fare values for Revenue Management, optional ATPCO subscription load and fare filing in ATPCO. Airlines are in full control of the pricing process.
The Revenue Management System prioritizes customer segmentation and total revenue optimization, including ancillaries, over the current inventory-based approach. A rich set of product and customer attributes is used in order to determine the optimum fare offering per segment also accounting for individual passenger preferences.
It takes advantage of innovative forecasting and optimization science, facilitating solid decisions to achieve capacity goals and improve passenger yield and total flight revenue.
This component combines priced itinerary options with the rich content and the merchandising engine. It maintains a record of every offer made by requestors, a log of the O&D and dates requested to support forecasting functionality.
This Order Management System decouples services ordering and tracking from the PSS and allows the airlines to create, track, and manage any type of service. It includes tables to support integration with revenue accounting systems, tracking settlement values of interline ancillaries, tracking payments, and tracking service deliveries by interfacing with the DCS.
– Know your customer
The PIM allows the airline to automatically assign an account number to each passenger. It relies on 14 parameters to ascertain a positive ID. Each one of these parameters has a different weight. When the total weight reaches 100, we have a100% match.
– Transition to passenger-centricity
Synchronizes PNRs booked on your current PSS with Orders stored in your Order Management System and converts bookings into passenger orders recorded under the passenger’s account.
– Know your distributors
This tool allows the airline to register an agency, giving it access to its NDC Platform. The tool is a UI that allows the airline to track the activities of the agency. It is also designed to be used as a sales process management tool to facilitate the migration of NDC prospects onto the NDC platform, track marketing campaign with MSEs, as well as order specific issues such as IROPs.
– Debits and Credits
The Order Management System contains all the tables needed to support the creation of ETD and EMD images, BSP Settlement, and payment tracking of direct settlement transactions. Depending on which RA system an airline is using, the choice is available for direct ticketless integration, or to follow the traditional path of ticketing and EMD creation. It is important to note that since every transaction is recorded under a passenger account, and agency incentives, taxes, and interline settlement are all built into the Order Management System, the airline has the option to consider any off-the-shelf accounting system to manage its books.
– We deliver services, not flight coupons
The Order Management System is capable of receiving PNL and ADL messages from the PSS and transforming them to include services and service descriptions to allow airport staff to support fulfillment functionality of any service. The check-in file is then sent back to the Order Management System to confirm that service delivery occurred and that the aircraft and configuration proposed was the actual aircraft and configuration flown.
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