Travelport GDS has announced a new, seven-year agreement with MLT Vacations, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines and one of the largest providers of vacation packages in the U.S. MLT manages multiple package vacation brands, including NWA WorldVacations, Worry-Free Vacations, Continental Airlines Vacations and, effective July 6, Delta Vacations. MLT Vacations will process all reservations for its four brands through Travelport’s GDS platform. One benefit to agents is a significant decrease in the instances of airline debit memos can be expected from use of the new Travelport technology tools.
“We are pleased to partner with Travelport, providing MLT Vacations suppliers and customers with consistent round-the-clock access to inventories and fares via a single robust connectivity platform," said Ken Pomerantz, president and chief marketing officer for MLT Vacations. “Our options for connectivity were either to build separate connections to each of our key suppliers or to use a GDS. In the end, Travelport’s global footprint, their e-Pricing and search capabilities and the efficiency to connect to a single platform were most in line with our needs. We are working closely with Travelport's technology team to maximize the performance of our connectivity and transaction systems which can grow with our business.”
The Travelport deal also provides MLT Vacations with three strategic solutions including: industry-leading e-Pricing, to ensure travelers have the most advanced tools for shopping low fares; Travelport Rapid Reprice, an automated ticket repricing product; and XML Pro, a web services solution enabling fast and efficient interface with Worldspan and the exchange of structured data.
MLT Vacations will implement Travelport Rapid Reprice, the product that has been automating the complex, time-consuming ticket exchange processes since 1999. Travelport Rapid Reprice enables MLT Vacations to increase efficiency by automatically recalculating the price of a ticket in a fraction of the time it takes to recalculate manually. The product automatically integrates fare and rule categories for voluntary changes, net fares, private fares and fare-by-rule from both ATPCO and SITA filed fares.
Travelport Rapid Reprice also facilitates repricing of tickets irrespective of the booking system that issued the ticket and has been delivering financial rewards to some of the world’s largest agency and airline customers. More than 100 million fully automated transactions have been processed since launch.
Powering the world’s major online travel retailers and leading travel providers, e-Pricing is capable of searching millions of fares and hundreds of thousands of itinerary options to find the lowest available fares and ensures airlines, consumers and travel agents get the information and choice they expect. The dynamic e-Pricing engine provides the fastest, most accurate fare searches, and yields more comprehensive itinerary results from a growing universe of Travelport participating airlines.
“This new agreement demonstrates the value that leading leisure travel vacation providers such as MLT Vacations place in Travelport’s cost-effective, reliable and broad-based e-Commerce solutions and shopping capabilities that access the broadest possible range of prices and schedules for clients around the world from one platform,” said Travis Christ, president of the Americas for Travelport GDS. “With our single platform, there is no need for tour operators to use multiple systems depending on the point-of-sale. MLT Vacations is one of the nation's premier vacation providers and Travelport GDS is proud to support them.”
MLT Vacations will also utilize XML Pro, the first XML solution for fast and efficient interface with a GDS that provides an affordable solution for travel companies to exchange structured data. XML Pro will also reduce operating costs and system maintenance. The technology also eliminates the need for suppliers and retailers to use third-party solutions for GDS interface, and employs the latest OpenTravel Alliance universal data transmission specifications for travel.
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