Global business travel platform Egencia has announced multi-country connection to NDC content from Lufthansa, claiming to be one of the biggest roll-outs of any TMC to date.
Clients and their travellers across ten countries can now access the fares from Lufthansa Group’s hub airlines (Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines and Swiss Airlines), some of which are no longer available via other distribution channels.
Egencia claims it is the first TMC to offer this NDC content “at a significant scale”.
The connection means travellers can shop, compare and book flights, while travel managers can report on key areas such as policy compliance, travel spend and duty of care across all fare types.
Thomas Eggert, Lufthansa’s senior director of global and strategic corporate accounts, commented: “We’re confident in the benefits of NDC for our shared travellers. Our partnership with Egencia delivers customers the most flexible choices for booking Lufthansa Group content. Working closely with Egencia presented Lufthansa Group an invaluable opportunity to provide greater innovation, more diverse content and enhance the booking experience for our customers.”
Egencia says more than a thousand of its travel consultants are now trained on Lufthansa’s own agent tools, which will enable them to service and support customers’ NDC bookings with no changes to existing processes. The content is displayed against other listings side-by-side to allow travellers to compare fares.
The TMC is also planning to roll out British Airways’ NDC content in November.
Arvind Prakash, VP of product management at Egencia, said: “As more and more airlines roll out NDC content, the options available to customers will only increase. Understanding and pinpointing the best options that will enhance the travellers’ experience is extremely important to us. Our strategy is to leverage Expedia Group’s technology first, which sources NDC content directly from the airline. And to ensure customers have access to a diverse range of air content for their travel programmes, critically we remain agile and open to multi-sourcing NDC content whether that be through GDSs, direct connects or aggregators.”
egencia.com