Avianca is partnering with Travelport for a new distribution partnership that will make Avianca the first major carrier from the Latin America region to adopt the GDS provider’s "Rich Content and Branding" component of the "Travelport Merchandising Platform."
Through the new distribution agreement, Avianca will market and retail their products more effectively through customization of product display and content.
Carlos Durán, vice president of marketing and sales, Avianca said: “Participating in Travelport’s merchandising platform will allow us to customize our product display and content within the latest version of Travelport Smartpoint, the industry-leading travel agency point-of-sale application. This provides enhanced functionality which allows Avianca to include product descriptions, images and branding information for eligible itineraries via Travelport Smartpoint.”
Since launching in 2011, Travelport Smartpoint has been adopted by more than 110,000 travel agents worldwide. The success of the application is its ability to offer users a blend of graphical and cryptic user interaction alongside a range of time-saving features: improving the agent user experience, reducing training costs, and speeding up the reservation process.
This agreement between Avianca and Travelport builds on two previous agreements between the two companies which provides Travelport-connected travel agents (Galileo, Apollo and Worldspan) with complete, global access to the group’s best fare inventory; and a technology services agreement providing Travelport Rapid Reprice across multiple distribution channels, fully automating the manual process of repricing and reissuing airline tickets when passenger itineraries change.
“We’re delighted to build upon our existing partnership with Avianca, and to see this industry-leading carrier become our first 'Rich Content and Branding' airline participant in the Latin America region,” said Christopher Engle, Travelport’s vice president of Global Distribution Sales & Service, Americas. “This agreement makes clear Travelport is executing its merchandising strategy: to enable airlines to distribute their fares and ancillary content in a manner they choose; to do so through the travel agency channel and; to do it in a way that protects the integrity and efficiency of the GDS booking and management process for travel agents.”
The Travelport Merchandising Platform was unveiled last year and includes three components: Travelport Aggregated Shopping, an industry first, consolidates, within the same screen, shopping results from traditional carriers who connect through ATPCO with those from other no-frills carriers who prefer to connect with Travelport via an API connection.
The new technology negates the need to shop and compare across several screens and allows travel agents to compare efficiently in the same booking flow. Travelport Ancillary Services allows travel agents to sell airline ancillaries such as pre-allocated seating, meals and bags, within their existing workflow rather than by booking on an airline website.
Travelport Rich Content and Branding enables airlines to market and retail their products more effectively through customization of product display and content.
For more details, visit www.travelportmerchandisingsolutions.com