American Airlines, American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) and Amadeus announced that they have reached a new milestone in the adoption of the New Distribution Capability (NDC) at the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) Convention 2019. The NDC is a travel industry-supported program launched by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) for the development and market adoption of a new, XML-based data transmission standard, with the aim of enhancing the capability of communications between airlines and travel agents.
At the GBTA Convention, American Airlines, American Express GBT and Amadeus announced that they have processed live bookings using American’s NDC-enabled content with American Express GBT leveraging the new Amadeus Travel API and aiming to exercise its full functionality of end-to-end booking flow and servicing, including cancellations, exchanges and ancillaries, when capabilities reach scalable production levels.
The three companies noted that the milestone is an important step forward for NDC adoption. The ability to power end-to-end workflow for NDC-enabled content from American demonstrates the importance and value of industry standards that are required to reach the point where travel agencies can shop, book and service NDC bookings at scale and match current performance levels, the organizations said.
The milestone was part of Amadeus’ NDC [X] program, which is dedicated to driving the industrialization of NDC and bringing together all the NDC activities across Amadeus — as an IT provider and aggregator — and focusing on the practical use cases of IATA’s NDC standard, in a test and learn approach, to deliver improved capabilities for the industry.
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