We recently organized an NDC Masterclass for Travel Sellers, led by Paul Ryumugabe, our VP of Product (Seller). In his session, titled “Demystifying NDC for Travel Sellers,” Paul touched on the complexities and shed light on how NDC is shaping the travel industry.
Check out the key insights from the masterclass below
So thank you for joining us for joining this call.
My name is Paul Ryumugabe and I’m the Vice President of Travel Seller Product at TPConnects
Just a little bit on my background.
I’ve been in travel industry since 2006, mainly working into revenue management for big OTAs in Europe.
Just to name one of them, I was heading pricing all the pricing tool and team and revenue at eDreams ODIGEO which is the biggest e-commerce in Europe.
I’ve joined TPConnects last year and since last year, we’ve really started developing an amazing product, which I’ll give you just a teaser demo at the end of the presentation.
This product is a product which really we’re proud of and we will be able to offer you and I’ll kind of like in the end of do introduce a little bit on how if you want to get in touch with us and good wants to use the product, how you can kind of like do that with us.
So let’s talk about TPConnects.
Who are we?
We are a global travel content aggregator in the distribution technology company.
We’ve been here 12 years now, started our journey as one of The Pioneers of NDC.We embraced NDC really from the beginning around 2012.
And it’s been a journey.
And for those of you who have been on this journey, you’ve seen the evolutions from where kind of like the journey started with not great technologies and the journey is still evolving, right?
So NDC is not a complete journey, but where we are this moment in time, I think really there’s clear potentials of benefiting what NDC technology offers and we’ve embraced it and we’re developing this.
We are on this journey and hoping to go to this journey with you in the future.
What we do, we really as an aggregator, we provide an ecosystem which will enable you to do your booking swiftly, seamlessly and in a very smart way using our solution. And we are a big team and a very strong team.
We have an amazing team of 150 people here in Dubai, majority of which 70% actually product and engineering.
So we believe in the product and we are here to build what we are proud of and believe is one of the best products out there in terms of aggregation.
Just to talk a little bit about NDC, I think the composition has been NDC is coming for the last 10 years.
What I say is NDC is here and I’ll also say really NDC is here to stay.
If you look at projection, official projection from the data is globally by 2025, 15% of global capacity will actually be under NDC.
In some airlines actually trying to commit around 20%, some even more than 20%. Right in the benefit for them, the IATA believes they’ll start kind of like benefiting from this connection.
Some most of airlines around 2023-25 and some of the airlines and most of you must kind of like know are kind of like going aggressive to try to kind of like make sure that people are adopting NDC.
So travel sellers are adopting NDC.
And a good example to give which I think is probably one of the extreme is American Airlines, which is requiring 30% of their booking channel to go via NDC to benefit from their loyalty program.
So as I said, just starting from that airlines are really adopting NDC, biggest major airlines already on NDC.
You have a map there you can see covers all the global part of the globe, whether you’re in Asia, Europe, Middle East or North America, all the major airline already on NDC and some of them have adopted different way of making sure that everyone is addressing NDC.
If you know GDSs surcharges have been increasing, you’ve got Air France and KLM who are kind of like now charged I think €21.00 each way.
You have Singapore airline which are doing $20 per ticket just to kind of give you a few examples.
BA is doing the same around €13 each way and Air Canada $24 per tickets.
So it’s kind of like a beneficial now clearly to embrace NDC to get benefit of lower fares because otherwise you’ll be curing GDS is increases.
And also looking at where the road is going.
If you consider that some of these airlines have a plan to really be 100% of NDC by 2030, you know the the world of GDS incentive is really temporarily at risk if we start kind of like thinking about the future of the travel industry where it’s going.
Having said that, it’s not just about penalties really to kind of like which should be the driver of us of joining the NDC journey.
There are actually opportunities.
There are really opportunities, NDC presents to us as travel sellers.
I’ll say revenue maximization and and opportunities, especially in upselling rich content.
It’s much, much easier to upsell in NDC. It’s really easy, swift and seamless to do so.
Efficiency and productivity, especially in terms of servicing.
With NDC, it’s easy to exchange, you get OCN messages easily, so you can actually alert your customers if there are delays and so forth and so on.
But in terms of exchange, change the ticket, changing the date is so easy and you don’t have to be, you know, a GDS genius, which you know, people have to be in the past to know all the funky function you have to use in GDS to issue reissue ticket reissue again, refund, partial reissues.
All these things in NDC are done seamlessly.
And if you have an aggregator which knows how to do the work for you and for your agent, would just be just a button to do so.
And NDC will enhance customer experience.
I talked a little bit about rich content, but also by being efficient, you really kind of luck helps you in terms of loyalty to your customers.
So it’s not just you know, go to NDC because there are penalties on GDS think we we have to think forward and actually really make sure that we’re taking advantages of opportunities which NDC offers to us as travel sellers.
Just to go for one of them in terms of revenue, just to kind of see an example in terms of ancillaries, you know, ancillaries in 2023 represented around 118 billions dollars.
And if you look up how airlines are kind of like now doing bundles in the way NDC offers you a better way to upsell.
This is a place to tap in and the opportunity is massive.
You know, it’s 110 billions we’re talking about and through videos and through images, you can easily try to upsell whether it’s in leg rooms, baggages, Wi-Fi and so forth and so on.
And NDC as a technology is built better to facilitate all this, which you’ll never be able to do if you use EDIFACT as your selling platform.
It’s not all easy, some kind of like trying to say that everything is rosy when it comes to NDC.
There are challenges and a significant barriers to adoption which are still there. Business cases sometimes it’s not clear.
Scale of investment obviously is a problem because majority of airlines are on a different path when it comes to NDC and they were whoever’s in that different path means some people are still you know if some of you know that knows the APIs we’re using in NDC, you know we are have, we are now the current version, the recent version is 21.3.
I think we started on 15, some airlines are on 17.2, some are still on 18.1
So you know, it requires investment if you want to deal with all this mess and obviously creates complexity in terms of technology.
And it can be intimidating when you think about all these airlines and knowing which one is where.
It can be intimidating and we still have lack of standardization even though other creation of NDC for those who’s been there, this was one of the key areas IATA insisted on everyone on everyone in terms of airlines and technology partners to the airlines to try and master.
The reality is we haven’t mastered and also the reality is airline are competitors to each other and they want to differentiate which doesn’t really help standardization. Functionality on some of them depending on where they are on the journey of the API especially for servicing, still is really limited.
So most of the API’s prime probably easy work so prime as in prime booking.
But when you start to reach shop exchange refund and all that activities in some of the APIs and some of the airlines are still have limited capabilities.
Commitment to content differentiation is also questionable in some of the airlines.
Some airlines really have like differentiated some of the airline examples Emirates have taken the lower three classes for example from GDS.
But some of the airlines the content is still is the same.
But when we have conversation with most of these airlines because really they want to get NDC to a higher percentages, they all kind of like have a road map or when they’re actually going to do their differentiation.
There have been lots of talks about dynamic and continuous pricing.
The reality is that dream is still distant on most airline and most technologies, right?
So challenges are there, opportunities are there.
So just kind of like want to make sure that the picture is clear.
And on top of it, NDC exists in complex ecosystem.
Just to give you a few examples of some airlines, some airline have a PCC and then and then an NDC technology provider which are different even though their PCC actually provides.
NDC technology, so someone will see it as on Altea’s PCC and actually be using Farelogix as NDC distributor or NDC creation.
Some of them will be on the PCCs as actually as TPConnects
We do also provide NDC technology on three airlines, Gulf Air, Cairo and Egypt Air.
So people are kind of like sitting on different system and different technologies which makes the whole connection to NDC complex.
Having said that, what what I’ll say you know is with all that in mind, so you want to take advantage of NDC, you want to kind of like really maximize the opportunities which are there and which are massive and also knowing that NDC is here and is here to stay, right?
You know what we should do, the travel seller seek and my recommendation is really to have a partnership with an aggregator who know what they, who knows what to do with this.
Because you do not want to spend time unless you have a massive technology team trying to kind of like standardise all the complexities of all the APIs and all the NDC technology suppliers and all the PSS suppliers.
Unless you know how to do right.
And that’s how companies like us will come handy to deal with this.
And what we do, we deal with every connection whether API, XML, not just kind of like NDC, which is done in the APIs, we deal with XML.
So we’ll give you all GDSs.
So currently we have Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport connected to us.
We have low cost, some of them through some other aggregators, some of them connected directly to us and we have NDC airlines.
What we do no matter where they’re coming from, no, no matter where they are on their journey, we take them and we take into our our characterization layer or normalization layer.
And we make sure that when we deliver this to you is just one single API, which is if you consume API, you don’t have to deal with whatever changes are going to happen tomorrow.
Whoever moves from 18.2 to 21.3, they actually started talking about 24.3, which is coming in the next few days.
You don’t have to deal with that.
We are here to deal with it for you and we’ll just give you a single API on the top of single API for those who do not consume API, so not because everyone of our partners is a tech company who can consume API.
We have a B2B portal which you can use to make your booking.
And at the end of this session, I’ll do as I said, I’ll do a simple teaser and, and demo on that B2B.
And if you want to do a further investigation and the, and the bigger demo on the on the tool will give you address and contact on how you can contact our sales team to take you through the full inventory of what the B2B can do.
Right.
But I also wanted to know just us providing you content.
We also you offer you some, you know, a revenue suite of tools which gives you capabilities to do a couple of things.
One is we give you a pricing intelligence which allows you to make margin on your flights, on your whether it’s prime on your flights when you upsell on your ancillaries.
And then we give you another tool and I’ll touch on it when I do a demo quickly, which allows you to actually decide which channel you want your content to come from, right?
So it’s the content intelligence.
Say you have NDC, British Airways and British Airways in Sabre, Amadeus or Travelport or all three.
You can choose which one you want your British Airways to come from and you can even differentiate it by RBD, by route and by cabin class.
So you can basically say in economy I want British Airways to come from GDS, Sabre or Amadeus, whichever one you want.
And I want my premium economy to come from NDC or vice versa or economy coming from NDC on this particular routes.
If you think that’s where the differentiation of content is or different this different variabilities.
If you think that’s where the differentiations comes from and we’ll say you really best way of getting here unless you have, you know, 150 engineers is really kind of like, you know, partner with an aggregator who’s been here for a long time and who knows what they do so they can deal with the complexity.
And you just just have to service your customers and take the benefits NDC offers today and tomorrow.
