As managed travel takes its first steps into the brave new
world of New Distribution Capability-enabled direct connects between airlines
and corporate clients, one lesson has become clear: Actually, there is no such
thing as a direct connect. At least one intermediary is almost always involved.
Building a distribution pipe from an airline, even a Web-based one, "is
not simple to achieve," Moshe Rafiah said with some understatement. And
that is why the name Travelfusion popped up in story after story in 2017,
emerging as the first major aggregator of the alternative air distribution era.
Rafiah founded London-based Travelfusion in 2000 to bundle
application programming interfaces from low-cost carriers and feed their
content to online travel agents, travel management companies and other service
providers. That experience positioned Travelfusion nicely when full-service
carriers decided they wanted to start distributing the same way, via APIs built
to NDC standards.
Travelfusion now offers APIs from more than 300 suppliers
worldwide. The vast majority remain budget carriers, but the number of
full-service airlines on the list shot up from two to 14 in 2017, and Rafiah
said another dozen are in the pipeline.
Perhaps just as significantly, he said, Travelfusion APIs
are now taken by nearly all online booking tools. This summer, BTN sister publication
The Beat revealed Concur has largely stopped building airline APIs itself. "All
we do is call Travelfusion," said a Concur executive. Another milestone
was Travelfusion's involvement in a customised connection of Web fares from the
U.K. airline Flybe into the KDS booking tool used by PwC.
Yet, in spite of the progress, Rafiah is "not going to
hide the difficulties" of managed travel making a success of NDC. While
Travelfusion and other aggregators can join airlines to TMCs, the TMCs are
struggling to integrate those bookings into the back-office systems where they
perform essential client functions like feeding traveller tracking tools and
creating management information. Although Rafiah said it is "not an area
we are interested in strategically," Travelfusion is actively
investigating building technology to solve this problem for TMCs in 2018.