Corporate travel booking has always come with its fair share of frustrations. Be it mixing personal preferences and needs to corporate travel policy; the ease of changing or cancellations, and above all the constant to and fro with your travel managers regarding what’s OK and what is not!
Today, with more and more airlines adapting to IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC), corporate travel buyers are paying more attention. From more transparency with fares, easy access to ancillaries and large amount of time saved from cumbersome processes, NDC is changing the way we do business travel.
NDC is defined as a set of technology standards, developed by IATA, to facilitate better communication between airlines and travel agents or corporate booking tools that will ultimately impact travel buyers and travelers as well. It empowers the airlines with the ability to take control over their product and provide a rich, personalized experience – the way they do through their websites – through third party channels.
As travel picks up, NDC will allow for that much-needed change from the traditional way we traveled, by offering greater flexibility and customization while ensuring safety . Today more than ever, it’s important to understand these benefits and more importantly take full advantage of them.
Here are some of the ways corporations can leverage NDC.
1. Personalization
With NDC, booking corporate travel online can become an easy, personalized experience as it is booking leisure travel. From choosing what they like, to saving their preferences to their profile for easy customization. For example, the extra leg space or access to Wi-Fi or when booking for a group, access to bundles that include lounge access and fast boarding are commonly requested ancillaries, they can be saved against the traveler profile ensuring faster and accurate search results for future bookings.
Likewise, NDC’s different pricing results are reflected during the booking process, giving travel managers/ agents a more accurate overview of what you can expect to pay.
2. Faster service
With seat upgrades or extra legroom or additional baggage or lounge access all chosen and paid for at the time of booking, the task of booking and completing your travel is faster without the need to leave the platform and make add additions via the airline’s website.
With NDC, its everything in one transaction in one platform. Know what to expect
One of the biggest draws with NDC content for airlines was the possibility to visually show customers what they were getting. NDC-rich content is based on a XML standard, that gives travelers and travel agents real-time experience with pictures and videos. For travelers always needing that extra legroom, this mean you know how much extra space you are buying. For travel agents, the visual representation means better knowledge and communication to customers about the product than just price and schedule.
4. Book LCC
With the increase in the number of low-cost carriers and their popularity for short, single-day trips, more and more corporate travelers are seeing the benefits of travelling low-cost. Access to an NDC platform means access to these flights without losing visibility of their air spend. Especially for low-cost carriers with no GDS presence, NDC can be such an enabler.
5. End-to-end integration
Last minute changes and cancellations known for when it comes to corporate travel. An end-to-end, NDC-platform will give these travelers the flexibility to make changes in flights booking, refunds cancellations easily, while ensuring they are in line with the corporate policies.
6. Easy Filters and Policy-setting
By setting policies based on traveler preferences, means travel managers can work with airlines to really narrow down on what they want or don’t want and ensure they have the right rich content that fits within their corporate policy.
This also gives employees the flexibility to book, change or cancel their itineraries within the set policies, thereby avoiding further approvals and simplifying the process.
