ATPCO & SITA to launch ‘NDC Exchange’ to support adoption of IATA’s NDC

ATPCO and SITA are joining forces to provide the airline industry with NDC Exchange, an industry-owned platform to support the adoption of IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) for air fares and ancillary sales. NDC Exchange will enable quick adoption of NDC, lower the cost of compliance to the schema, while supporting complex interlining as airlines migrate to the new distribution format.

“Participating in NDC Exchange as the launch pilot carrier provides an enormous amount of potential benefit to Air Canada” said Keith Wallis, Director of Global Product Distribution for Air Canada. “Beyond the obvious technical benefits of speed to market with an NDC-compliant API and the ability to support multiple standards and schemas, Air Canada is keenly interested in the community effect, whereby the benefit of a distribution network of like-minded partners grows exponentially with each new participant in NDC Exchange.”

NDC Exchange will facilitate the real-time exchange of pricing, shopping and ancillary messages between airlines, travel agents and aggregators. It will normalize messages that use various versions of the NDC schemas. In addition, it will translate messages that are based on non-NDC schemas such as the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) XML schema. In doing this, ATPCO and SITA will support accelerated industry implementation of APIs and NDC while creating interoperability between the existing distribution model and NDC. This will reduce the overall cost to connect to, and support, multiple schema versions.

Rolf Purzer, President & CEO, ATPCO, said: “ATPCO recognized the growing demand for simple, cost-effective API connectivity some time ago. In our partnership with SITA, we have developed this solution to enhance the complex distribution landscape, giving everyone a clear path to incorporate all methods of distribution.”

Ilya Gutlin, SITA President, Air Transport Solutions, said: “NDC can be very disruptive for airline distribution. While it offers exciting new opportunities in the marketplace, it also presents new business and technical challenges for airlines. SITA is teaming with ATPCO to provide an air transport community solution that will facilitate NDC adoption by reducing the complexity for airlines to establish and maintain direct connections with travel agencies and travel management companies.”