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Managed travel technology provider and travel management company Spotnana announced on Thursday (27 July) that the company has enabled travellers to self-serve cross exchanges for EDIFACT and NDC tickets.
The limitation of holding unused ticket credits for EDIFACT tickets and not being able to exchange them for NDC tickets, which often offer savings when compared to EDIFACT, came to a head in April when American Airlines moved forward with its NDC strategy. The issue left travel programmes with EDIFACT-based American Airlines credits with few options to redeem those credits for potential NDC savings without subjecting the exchange to agent services that would incur fees that would erode savings.
American Airlines and Accelya announced a fix in June, and Spotnana is the first to implement the solution for clients.
“Spotnana added support for NDC redemptions of EDIFACT-based flight credits in a matter of weeks,” said AA director of airline retailing technology Anthony Rader in a statement.
Additionally, the company internally has built a solution for unused NDC ticket exchanges to ensure the capability to exchange runs both ways.
When a booking is cancelled, Spotnana automatically requests unused ticket credit details via its direct NDC API integrations. It stores the results in its extensible system of record, and associates those credits with the individual traveller.
“It was very important to us to deliver capabilities for managing unused tickets for both EDIFACT and NDC fares at the same time,” Spotnana founder and CEO Sarosh Waghmar wrote in a blog posted this morning. “Wherever possible, we strive to deliver the same capabilities across all distribution channels and content sources, so travellers have a consistent experience.”
Travellers can self-serve EDIFACT-NDC exchanges
While Spotnana agents can execute such exchanges, Spotnana has pushed the capability to travellers themselves in the online booking tool.
“We believe travellers should only reach out to an agent when they want to, and not because technology gaps leave them no other choice,” Waghmar wrote in the blog, characterising the technical exercise of surfacing ticket credit sources into the live booking process as “trivial” once the exchange capabilities and data availability were in place.
An individual’s credits are displayed at the time of booking and can be selected to apply to a booking or deselected for later use.
Spotnana’s self-booking tool and agent tools operate on the same platform, giving both parties real-time visibility to trip details and changes. The Spotnana booking engine automates the exchange workflow, including communication with the airline.
The EDIFACT-NDC ticket exchange capability joins other self-serve exchange capabilities on the Spotnana platform, including multiple exchanges of the same flight, exchanges and cancellations of partially flown flights, exchanges of tickets with a pending upgrade, and the ability for a traveller to cancel a flight and choose either an unused ticket credit or a refund if the amounts differ, according to Waghmar.
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