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AgentPlus NDC booking platform with Air France-KLM fares

Air France-KLM certifies HitchHiker for NDC booking of its private fares

05 Jun 2020 | Comments: 0 | Posted by: Pervin Bayram | In: News

In June 2018, Air France-KLM certified the NDC connection of the Frankfurt software company HitchHiker for the first time. Now the functional scope of the interface has been expanded to include other important fare types.

Recently certified fare types are the airline’s private fares. They include both tour operator, consolidator and “visit friends and relatives” fares.

HitchHiker now also supports bookings with account or corporate code. This enhancement should be of particular interest to business travel agents who want to save the airline’s additional Distribution Cost Charge applied on GDS bookings.

“We are pleased to be one of the first IT providers worldwide to be able to provide the private fares of Air France and KLM via NDC and offer tour operators, wholesalers and business travel agencies real added value through our direct connection,” comments Managing Director Thomas Boffo on the cooperation.

“In these difficult times for our industry, it is important that we focus on our priorities and continue to invest in strategic development areas such as NDC. In this context it is great to see that HitchHiker is one of the first providers of software solutions for the international travel industry to offer the opportunity to distribute our private fares. This is an important step to further support our joint customers”, explains Stefan Gumuseli, General Manager Germany at Air France-KLM.

The airline’s private, corporate and published fares can be booked via the HitchHiker Flight API and the AgentPlus booking platform. For the subsequent management and processing of all bookings, HitchHiker provides a Booking Manager, through which NDC bookings can be processed just as easily as GDS bookings made using the HitchHiker system.

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HitchHiker receives IATA NDC Level 3 certification

08 Oct 2018 | Comments: 0 | Posted by: Pervin Bayram | In: News

Frankfurt based software manufacturer HitchHiker has recently achieved Level 3 certification by the International Air Transport Association, which is currently the highest level for IT service providers and officially demonstrates its long-term commitment to IATA’s “New Distribution Capability” program.

IATA’s “NDC Capable” Level 3 certification confirms that HitchHiker can send and receive offer and order management related messages in NDC format. This includes API commands for fare and availability queries, bookings with immediate ticketing, on-hold bookings with subsequent ticketing, credit card & BSP/ARC payments, re-bookings, cancellations and ticket refunds as well as seat map retrieval including availability and prices.

“Our customers are mainly online travel agencies, tour operators and business travel companies with an affinity for technology, who already rely on our years of experience with direct connections to airline systems of low-cost carriers and who are now also increasingly opting to book full-service carriers through their own NDC interfaces. The focus of this decision is mainly on the competitive advantage through attractively priced offers, low distribution system costs and additional revenues from the sale of ancillaries.

Today, we already cooperate with a number of well-known NDC airlines. Our objective is to provide a standardized interface that aggregates existing NDC interfaces, which equalizes differences between the format versions used by the respective airlines and which facilitates our customers transition to NDC through a simplified implementation process,” explains Thomas Boffo, Managing Director of HitchHiker GmbH.

The certification by the IATA also represents an important first step in positioning HitchHiker also as a service provider for airlines, which will include the implementation and hosting of NDC interfaces for airlines very shortly.

IATA NDC Capable Level 3

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