Travelport GDS launches Agencia with Air Canada

Air Canada is now using Travelport Agencia, a travel booking solution that delivers access to the complete portfolio of Air Canada product in a seamless manner to users of Travelport’s Apollo GDS.

Travelport Agencia enables travel agencies to not only display and book all of Air Canada’s fares families (including Tango, Tango Plus, Latitude, and Executive Class) with real time access to price and availability, but also to book any service from the Air Canada a la carte menu. These services include among others, lounge access, pre-paid on board café vouchers, checked baggage and seat assignment.

Furthermore, users of Travelport Agencia are able to utilise the Air Canada Flight Pass program, which is a special Air Canada offering of pre paid electronic one way flight credits which consumers and corporate customers can draw down upon as required.

Additionally, travel agencies in Canada using this product can compare and contrast the Air Canada product for domestic, US transborder and international journeys originating in Canada with the existing offerings made by the other airlines who participate in Travelport.

“What differentiates Travelport Agencia in the market is the efficient aggregation of Air Canada’s full range of a la carte products that until now sat outside the GDS, requiring inefficient business practices for travel agencies as they had to work around this limitation,” said Travis Christ, president and managing director, Travelport GDS for the Americas. “We remain the only GDS to provide any solution with the capability to merchandise Air Canada’s full product offerings or modify bookings. Other solutions may bring together GDS and non GDS products but they do so via screen scraping which doesn’t provide the full view of fares, nor the efficiency and functionality that travel agents require today.”

Gordon Wilson, CEO for Travelport GDS, added “Travelport Agencia is the first delivered illustration of the way in which Travelport is investing in its products for on-line and off-line travel agencies and corporations to handle the changing manner in which airline (and hotel and car rental) services are being packaged and sold. The learnings of this very positive engagement with Air Canada have been built into our plans for the Travelport Universal Desktop which will begin global roll out in 2010. It will take to a new level the ability of airlines, hoteliers, car rental companies and travel agencies in the 160 countries in which we operate, to change fundamentally the manner in which travel products are displayed, offered, priced and booked for consumers in the channels where consumers want to see choice.”

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