Most travel sellers managing a wider content mix separately know the operational friction it creates: agents toggling between five, six, seven portals just to find the right fare. What’s less visible is the development cost sitting underneath it, the integration work, the schema mapping, the version upgrades, repeated every time an airline changes something or a new one is added.
In the latest instalment of the TPConnects Interview Series, Stephanos Kykkotis, Director of Product, Travel Seller Solutions at TPConnects, breaks down how API normalization actually works, what it costs agencies to keep managing content the old way, and how a single integration gives travel sellers access to a constantly growing pool of airline content without absorbing the changes that come with it. The conversation also covers the Express API now live for travel sellers, what early testing showed on response size and speed, and where Iris is headed next.
About Stephanos Kykkotis
Stephanos leads product for Iris at TPConnects, the air content aggregation platform connecting travel sellers to 70+ NDC, LCC, and GDS sources through a single normalized API. He has overseen Iris’s growth from a handful of airline integrations to one of the broadest content libraries available to travel agencies today, and led the development of the Express API, TPConnects’s proprietary schema built for speed and scale.
What the interview covers
- The real cost of content fragmentation.
Agents toggling between five, six, seven portals to find the cheapest fare. Stephanos breaks down exactly where the time goes, why this model isn’t scalable, and what agencies are actually giving up by staying fragmented.
- How API normalization actually works.
Every airline returns the same data differently. Stephanos explains how Iris standardizes content across GDS, NDC, and LCC sources so travel agencies integrate once and never have to touch it again when a new airline goes live.
- The Express API and what faster response times mean for your booking flow.
Standard schemas have their limits. Stephanos walks through why TPConnects built a proprietary Express API from scratch, what testing showed, and why response size is the metric that actually matters for shopping performance.
- Servicing beyond the booking.
Most aggregators handle the booking and stop there. Stephanos explains how Iris extends API capabilities into exchanges, refunds, schedule change notifications, and ancillary management, so agencies don’t need offline agents to service what they’ve booked.
The interview is available on demand. If you’re a travel agency owner, OTA product lead, consolidator manager, or TMC operations team managing multiple content integrations today, or evaluating a move to a normalized aggregation layer, this interview is for you.
