To help travel agencies better understand how to stay on top during the NDC rollout, Scott Barber, Travelport’s Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, has put together his ‘Three Tips” for agencies to get started to bring the best opportunities to their customers.
Barber says agencies need to understand the new rules of engagement and how to maximise their role.
Three tips for agencies to stay on top during the NDC rollout
By Scott Barber, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, Travelport.
Inaction is no longer the best policy when it comes to NDC. While many have been waiting until recently to see what will happen, it is now clear agencies need to understand the new rules of engagement and how to maximise their role. The IATA NDC airline Leaderboard – 21 airlines in total, including Qantas – have committed to transact 20 per cent of their volume through NDC-capable APIs by 2020 and many airlines have set out their intentions to heavily prioritise API bookings in the future.
All of this NDC momentum means that the time for procrastination is most definitely over. With NDC looming in the horizon, there are about to be some significant changes to the way you work. Now is the time to make sure you can benefit from what NDC offers or risk losing out to better prepared competitors.
So how can you maximise the opportunities of NDC, both to strengthen your supplier relationships and deliver more relevant, compelling offers to your customers?
Here are three ways you can get started to bring the best opportunities to your customers:
1) Information is key
Talk of NDC has been ongoing for several years and opinions on the topic have varied over that time. Many agencies are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach, taking time before adopting an active role once it becomes ‘real’. Well, it is real and slowly NDC is becoming closer to being part of your everyday life. Having a deep understanding on what it is and how is will affect your environment is the essential first step.
At its heart, NDC is standardisation of API connectivity; that line alone is enough to have many people’s eyes glaze over, which is technology providers are here to worry about the plumbing. However, the new technology brings new sales capabilities. It’s this element that is likely to change your workflow as we move away from the traditional booking classes, filed fares and full transparency on availability into a new world where ‘offers’ replace fares and ‘personalisation’ trumps ‘full content’.
NDC is the talk of the travel industry. From events to online content, including webinars and blogs, many vendors are sharing advice on how you can tackle this change for the better of your business. The critical first step in handling NDC is becoming more educated.
2) It’s all about the experience
To some extent, agencies have been competing on a level playing field for decades, with everyone having access to the same public fares on all routes. With NDC, this could change, with airlines providing differentiated content to agencies, corporates or even the end traveller.
This is a big change, not just for the industry, but also for the travelling public. What isn’t new however is the increasing desire of customers to have an experience over a transaction. NDC may help with that, one of the benefits of the new technology is in the ability to get much more information back from a search which will help deliver a more seamless and rich experience
NDC bookings through the GDS will be processed in the airline systems and airlines themselves will be responsible for creating customer offers; this means your customers really must be at the core of what you do. With all of this new content coming down the NDC API, you need to know what customers truly want and need so you can discuss relevant, compelling offers to them.
3) Search for success
One of the major changes with NDC is that just a few fare options will be replaced with a much larger number of offers that include a wide range of fares and ancillaries. This is great in terms of giving customers more choice, value and relevance, but it can also increase complexity in the search process and make bookings more time consuming.
The trick here is to be highly prescriptive and specific in your searches for NDC content. That’s because simply searching for a fare between two cities on a certain day will potentially return hundreds of results that your agents will need to sift through and explain to customers at length. You can avoid this by searching for an offer that includes the desired route and stop overs, and all the right ancillaries – from VIP lounge access to priority boarding.
The benefits of being specific will be time saving for booking agents, but also deliver a faster, more relevant experience for customers. And that means more sales and more success for your business.
Agents need to talk to their partners in the industry, from airline companies to GDS companies, but also their customers to understand what they really want from their agency. By working across the board to gain a full understanding of the new NDC rules, you can uncover how to make them work for your business and plan for the future.
IMAGE: Travelport ANZ md Scott Barber
