American and Sabre Forging NDC Link

American Airlines dropped a bombshell at today’s Airlines Reporting Corp.’s TravelConnect users meeting, announcing that its first NDC-compliant implementation with a GDS will be with Sabre.

“They were the last to agree to it and the first to implement,” said Cory Garner, American’s managing director of distribution and data commercialization. Both Travelport and Amadeus signed up in the first half of 2013.

Garner said the implementation with Sabre was made easier by the fact that their systems are essentially the same, and American’s passenger services system is hosted on Sabre.

Garner’s revelation took the audience of agents and airline executives by surprise, given American’s relationship with Sabre over the past few years, which included a bitter, multimillion-dollar antitrust lawsuit that grew out of the carrier’s desire to connect with GDSs via XML.

The initial implementation will allow Sabre agents to book American’s paid seats. Transactions will be settled through ARC, and “all content will fit into the agent workflow,” Garner said.

Next month, a small group of agencies will begin using the option, and “we’ll watch how it behaves in production,” he said.

Currently, Sabre agents can view and select a seat on a seat map, but they cannot book paid seats. Once the new link is implemented, they will see details of the seat product as well as its pricing.

“NDC is not a vision, it’s a reality,” Garner said.

American’s XML connection technology was, in a sense, NDC-compliant before there was NDC. It was developed with Farelogix, whose XML schema set was donated to Open Axis, an airline group that promoted XML as the preferred messaging language for airlines. IATA, in turn, selected it as the starting point for the NDC standard.  

Garner also disclosed that American is “kicking the tires” with Travelport’s merchandising solutions, including Rich Content & Branding.

Pic: Sergey Kustov