Travelport GDS Introduces Merchandising First for Air Canada

Travel agents will now have the tools to sell Air Canada's full range of product offerings with Travelport GDS’s  introduction and launch of Travelport Agenciax2122. Travelport GDS says the new tool is a revolutionary travel booking solution that delivers access to the complete portfolio of Air Canada products in a seamless manner to users of Travelport's Apollo GDS.

Travelport Agencia enables travel agencies to not only display and book all of Air Canada's fares families (including Tango, Tango Plus, Latitude, and Executive Class) with real time access to price and availability, but also to book any service from the Air Canada a la carte menu.

These services include among others, lounge access, pre-paid on board cafe vouchers, checked baggage and seat assignment.  Furthermore, users of Travelport Agencia are able to utilize the Air Canada Flight Pass program, which is a special Air Canada offering of pre paid electronic one way flight credits which consumers and corporate customers can draw down upon as required.

Additionally, travel agencies in Canada using this product can compare and contrast the Air Canada product for domestic, US transborder and international journeys originating in Canada with the existing offerings made by the other airlines who participate in Travelport.

Travelport says it is the only GDS company to have brought such a rich blend of traditional airline content (pricing and availability) with the new manner in which Air Canada wishes to sell its products (fares families, a wide range of optional services) together into one user experience for the travel agency community. In the coming months the same capability is being added to Travelport's own corporate online booking tool, Traversax2122;, deployed with companies such as IBM.

"What differentiates Travelport Agencia in the market is the efficient aggregation of Air Canada's full range of a la carte products that until now sat outside the GDS, requiring inefficient business practices for travel agencies as they had to work around this limitation" said Travis Christ, president and managing director, Travelport GDS for the Americas.

"We remain the only GDS to provide any solution with the capability to merchandise Air Canada's full product offerings or modify bookings. Other solutions may bring together GDS and non GDS products but they do so via screen scraping which doesn't provide the full view of fares, nor the efficiency and functionality that travel agents require today,” Christ says.

According to Gordon Wilson, CEO for Travelport GDS, "Travelport Agencia is the first delivered illustration of the way in which Travelport is investing in its products for on-line and off-line travel agencies and corporations to handle the changing manner in which airline (and hotel and car rental) services are being packaged and sold.”

“The learnings of this very positive engagement with Air Canada have been built into our plans for the Travelport Universal Desktopx2122; which will begin global roll out in 2010.  It will take to a new level the ability of airlines, hoteliers, car rental companies and travel agencies in the 160 countries in which we operate, to change fundamentally the manner in which travel products are displayed, offered, priced and booked for consumers in the channels where consumers want to see choice," Wilson said.

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