FINALLY, NDC THAT SHOWS YOU THE MONEY

01

The real price of going direct

Direct connects and aggregators promise simplicity, but in practice, they can introduce unexpected challenges. What looks like a shortcut often becomes a maze of one-to-one integrations, servicing gaps, and manual workarounds. These complications often result in higher operational costs and a less seamless experience for travelers. That’s why many agencies are re-evaluating their approach and turning to platforms that offer one-to-many connectivity, curated content, and streamlined workflows.

With direct connects, it’s one airline, one integration — and no two are alike. That’s developer time, QA time, and constant upkeep. You also inherit the responsibility to monitor uptime, manage throttling, track schema drift, and troubleshoot across multiple partners. Travelport simplifies this by offering a single connection to many airlines, absorbing the complexity and managing provider relationships on your behalf. 

Direct connects often deliver content but not the workflows agencies require. The result: agents toggle between portals, processes, and policies. Travelport integrates NDC and private fares into your existing workflows, eliminating duplication and distraction. Your agents work one way; everything else just works with them. 

Going direct also means your commercial team negotiates and manages access airline by airline. With Travelport, you operate through a single platform supported by established airline partnerships, so you keep your leverage and simplify your vendor footprint. 

And while cost is a factor, it’s about more than just price. It’s about scalability, sustainability, and simplicity. Travelport’s shared infrastructure and proactive version management remove the burden of ongoing version upgrades, bespoke change control, and schema transitions across carriers — so you can focus on selling, not servicing.

02

Why agencies choose Travelport for NDC

Not all NDC solutions are created equal. Travelport stands apart because we don’t just connect airlines — we make retailing work for agencies, because we think like agencies. From retail-ready content and full servicing to advanced normalization and revenue tools, our approach is designed to simplify complexity and unlock profitability. 

Retail-ready content
This is where we differentiate. Travelport provides fully retail-ready content, optimizing how traditional fares and NDC offers appear side by side. Our curation focuses on clarity and conversion: brand matrices with Routehappy media and attributes (now included), transparent upsells, and clear value at the point of decision. It’s the best platform for short-term wins and long-term resilience. 

Our NDC solutions are built around agency workflows. Training, support, and documentation are modernized for how your teams actually sell and serve. From desktop to API, everything is designed to reduce handle time, cut errors, and lift attachment on the things that matter — seats, bags, flexibility, and more. 

Unlike many aggregators, which deliver fragmented content or partial servicing, Travelport provides a unified experience. Agents don’t need to switch tools or relearn processes — everything is integrated into the workflows they already know.

Comprehensive servicing 
Travelport delivers full servicing for NDC bookings — ancillaries to disruptions — without forcing agents into airline tools. There’s no need to call the airline to divide a booking or add an ancillary; everything is booked, paid for, and reported into your mid- and back-office systems, and reflected in your daily sales reports. Every change is tracked and reported for accurate invoicing, reconciliation, and duty of care. Our disruption workflow gives both online and offline agencies a guided path to fully service impacted reservations. Agents receive proactive prompts in their queues, so no case is missed and every traveler gets timely options. 

Many aggregators struggle with divide PNRs, ancillary payments, exchanges, and involuntary changes — often sending you back to the airline. Travelport keeps it in one place. We ensure consistent servicing rights and fulfillment terms across carriers, unlike direct connects where each airline defines its own commercial model. 

Through Trip Services, our modern, flexible API suite which supports both online and offline workflows. Agencies can customize their own digital journeys or use Smartpoint for seamless servicing — same content, same outcomes. One modern API integration delivers aggregated, normalized access to both traditional and NDC content. That means consistent mid- and back-office workflows, duty of care, and reporting — critical for TMCs and OTAs managing corporate or multi-carrier itineraries.

Normalization: The Travelport Difference

Every airline’s NDC is a little different. Travelport’s normalization engine makes those differences invisible to your agents and systems: