AmTrav has begun making bookings on Southwest Airlines via
ATPCO and SITA's NDC Exchange platform. The move will improve the travel
management company's ability to sell the carrier, AmTrav CEO Jeff Klee said. AmTrav
already had workarounds in place to handle Southwest bookings, so corporate
customers will not notice a huge difference in bookings, but managing them will
become easier, Klee said. In particular, AmTrav will be better able to deliver
corporate discounts to those clients who had negotiated them with Southwest,
and it also will be simpler to make changes to bookings.
"We've been asking Southwest for better connectivity; with
our solutions, there had always been limitations and either the customer
suffered or our ops team suffered or a combination of both," Klee said.
"We're really excited to finally get a great solution in place that solves
the end-to-end process. It's not just about shopping, pricing and booking but
servicing. Corporate travelers change tickets all the time, so this will make
that easier for them, too."
Southwest announced in July it
had joined NDC Exchange. The AmTrav implementation took about four weeks. The
capabilities will be fully rolled out on Oct. 7, Klee said.
Southwest senior director of B2B strategy Rob Brown said the
aim was "to remove friction and pain points" and that joining NDC
Exchange has enabled Southwest to move faster in its
recently announced distribution strategy for corporate travel. NDC Exchange
"allowed us to connect to potential partners that otherwise wouldn't have
been able to without investment in money and time to our own [application
programming interface]," Brown said. Brown could not yet reveal other
partners in the works via NDC Exchange, but he said others "should be
onboarded in [the fourth quarter] for sure."
ATPCO head of NDC and partnerships Graham Wareham said
working with Southwest and Amtrav gave ATPCO the experience to "refine and
simplify" the process so future implementations could be even quicker.