World's First NDC-Native Airline Technology Solution Developed by Air Black Box Now Fully Certified NDC Level 4
Air Black Box, the first global travel technology company founded to solve the complexities of traditional interlining and enable the sale of connecting tickets combining network airlines, low-cost carriers and surface transport providers, has been certified by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as NDC Level 4 Compliant (v20.1). By achieving Level 4 certification — the highest NDC certification level — Air Black Box ensures that its airline partners can maximize new revenue opportunities using NDC capabilities.
New Distribution Capability or NDC was developed by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to transform the retailing of airline and travel products to leisure and business travelers. NDC helps solve legacy limitations in distributing travel inventory with enhanced product differentiation, faster time-to-market, access to comprehensive content and a more transparent shopping experience for travelers.
"The aviation sector is showing a tremendous need for technology that can support and build on airlines' existing investments in the IATA NDC standard," said Rick Howell, chief executive officer of Air Black Box. "Our NDC-enabled Air Connection Engine minimizes transactional overhead, eliminates the need for a translation layer and helps airlines get the most out of their NDC investments."
Setting the Air Connection Engine apart is its ability to make participating airline inventory accessible and consumable in an NDC format, easily and quickly. It fulfills the promise of NDC for ancillary merchandising and revenue and more profitable commercial alliances among and between airlines without requiring development input from participating carriers.
For airlines and their passenger service systems (PSS), the Air Connection Engine expands and enhances their ability to distribute and sell inventory and merchandise, using traveler itinerary information across the most advanced form of interlining. With built-in support for interline baggage handling, rapid multi-carrier/multi-region/multi-currency payment and settlement options and IROPS-mitigation-as-a-Service, the re-engineered platform demonstrates NDC-enabled cross-carrier communication at its best.
The Air Connection Engine has all technical requirements (cloud-native, globally deployed, carrier managed) to complement existing NDC investments, while the configurable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is accessible via API. Air Black Box's technology gives airlines and their customers a rich interlining experience and baggage add-on capabilities directly through the carrier's direct channel.
"This is the airline and travel technology model of the future," said Howell. "Simple, powerful, flexible, scalable solutions are delivering huge impact on airlines' bottom line and giving them tools for success to become fuller retailers of inventory and merchandise. And it's the vision Air Black Box is delivering though a global, multi-carrier direct channel platform that is infinitely configurable, expandable and future-proof."
