LANGLEY, UK — Travelport, a leading travel commerce marketplace providing distribution, technology, payment and other solutions for the $7 trillion global travel and tourism industry, has outlined details of its new global brand vision and strategy.
In a bid to more accurately describe the role Travelport now plays in the global travel distribution chain, where it has strategically invested over recent years, the new vision is a significant departure from historical GDS terminology and language, said the company.
The new company vision was developed to more closely align with what Travelport now offers the industry, rather than over 40 years ago when it was first developed by airlines and largely concentrated only on basic air transaction processing. The new vision, ‘The platform that is redefining travel commerce for our customers’, reflects this evolution.
Travelport’s differentiated content and product offering now includes:
• eNett payment solutions, which are fully integrated into the travel agent’s desktop and workflows to enable secure, electronic payments between travel agencies and travel providers.
• Enhanced air content distributed through its platform to include fares and ancillary products from low cost carriers as well as network carriers through the same point of sale and workflow management tools. With the addition of Ryanair content at the end of the March 2014, Travelport is now positioned as the only major company in this space to be able to sell content for all of the world’s top 10 airlines.
• Expanded hotel content offering the ability to travel agencies to make real time reservations for more than 580,000 individual hotel properties, again, leading in this space.
• Airline merchandising providing functionality which allows airlines to connect to Travelport, and distribute their ancillary products as well as their fares, through either traditional fare filing methods such as ATPCo, or via XML APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
As part of the brand re-launch, Travelport has also taken the opportunity to more clearly define its key business activities by re-naming its two main operational areas. First, its Travel Commerce Platform, including merchandising, reservations, payments and workflow management, which accounted for 95% of its revenue in quarter one this year, and second, its Technology Services business through which it provides critical IT services to airlines for their internal and direct channel use.
The Travel Commerce Platform revenue is further classified according to its source as either Air or Beyond Air. Beyond Air, which includes revenues from hospitality, advertising and payments, now accounts for around 19% of Travelport’s Travel Commerce Platform revenue and continues to grow at a strong pace.
Through Technology Services, Travelport provides systems management and IT services to airlines, most notably Delta, as well as some key component IT solutions for vital airline functions such as shopping, faring, the issuance of accountable documents, interline exchanges and departure control.
Gordon Wilson, President and CEO of Travelport, explained the rationale for the new brand vision and operational definitions:
“We’ve evolved the way we both distribute content for our travel provider customers and made it more easily accessible and bookable by our travel agency customers. We have invested in, and developed our business to address the changing needs of the travel distribution chain, which we are now articulating through our new, and more up to date, brand proposition that clearly explains what we offer our customers. We have encapsulated this as: ‘Redefining travel commerce for our customers’ and we look forward to continuing to deliver on this vision and helping our customers grow their businesses in the months and years ahead.”
