ATPCO and SITA Join Forces to Provide Airline Industry with NDC Exchange

ATPCO and SITA have joined forces to provide the airline industry with NDC Exchange, an industry-owned platform to support the adoption of IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) for air fares and ancillary sales.

NDC Exchange is designed to provide simple and cost-effective API connectivity for airlines and their partners to facilitate data exchange. The service has already been successfully piloted by several major international airlines, including Air Canada and British Airways.

“Participating in NDC Exchange as the launch pilot carrier provides an enormous amount of potential benefit to Air Canada,” said Keith Wallis, Director of Global Product Distribution for Air Canada. “Beyond the obvious technical benefits of speed to market with an NDC-compliant API and the ability to support multiple standards and schemas, Air Canada is keenly interested in the community effect, whereby the benefit of a distribution network of like-minded partners grows exponentially with each new participant in NDC Exchange.”

NDC Exchange will facilitate the real-time exchange of pricing, shopping and ancillary messages between airlines, travel agents and aggregators. It will normalize messages that use various versions of the NDC schemas. In addition, it will translate messages that are based on non-NDC schemas such as the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) XML schema.

Ilya Gutlin (pictured), SITA President, Air Transport Solutions, said, “NDC can be very disruptive for airline distribution. While it offers exciting new opportunities in the marketplace, it also presents new business and technical challenges for airlines. SITA is teaming with ATPCO to provide an air transport community solution that will facilitate NDC adoption by reducing the complexity for airlines to establish and maintain direct connections with travel agencies and travel management companies.”

ATPCO and SITA are certified IATA NDC Capable IT providers and the NDC Exchange has been given the Level 3 NDC certification. This is the highest level of certification offered by IATA and covers the full spectrum of order management and shopping. 

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