NEW YORK & DULLES, VA – 14 March 2018 – Routehappy, the industry standard for airline rich content, today announced that its airline rich content is now available via NDC Exchange, the leading standard for NDC message translation developed jointly by ATPCO & SITA. This move marks a major step forward for Routehappy, the newly acquired subsidiary of ATPCO, the leading source for airline industry pricing and shopping data.

Routehappy is the airline industry’s leading rich content provider for flight shopping, and Routehappy’s rich content is quickly gaining traction among airlines and travel sellers by significantly improving the flight shopping experience via its hyper-targeted Universal Product Attributes (UPAs) and Universal Ticket Attributes (UTAs). UPAs provide relevant media to describe an airline’s product and services by aircraft type, cabin, time of day, and more. UTAs provide easy-to-understand benefits and restrictions by fare. With UPAs and UTAs now available via NDC Exchange, airlines will be able to provide a consistent product offering across the entire travel distribution ecosystem.

“As a customer-centric airline that is focused on delivering a superior travel experience, we are always looking for innovative solutions that allow us to market our premium level products and differentiate ourselves from the competition. With this integration, ATPCO is providing us with the ability to combine our pricing data with rich content so that all our product offering information is in one place. As an existing Routehappy subscriber, NDC Exchange becomes even more valuable to us at Air Canada as it now allows us to quickly and simply provide our NDC Exchange distribution partners with product content combined with rich media in one connection, and that provides significant benefit to us and to our NDC Exchange partners,” said Keith Wallis, Air Canada’s Director of Global Product Distribution.

NDC Exchange is the first community-driven marketplace providing airlines and sellers the ability to connect once to the exchange and have instant connectivity to all other players in the exchange, creating interoperability between NDC schema versions. Announced in October 2017, NDC Exchange has multiple pilot participants benefiting from NDC Exchange’s simple and cost-effective entry into the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) New Distribution Capability (NDC). IATA has awarded Level 3 NDC-capable Offer & Order Management certification to NDC Exchange, and Routehappy is a certified ‘Supporting NDC’ entity. The integration of Routehappy rich content UPAs and UTAs into the NDC Exchange will provide Routehappy airline customers with the ability to have their rich content seamlessly integrated into their NDC offers.

“This is true industry advancement and an important first step as we deepen the technical integration between Routehappy and ATPCO. We have created a streamlined process for getting all content out into the market more easily, saving airlines and travel sellers time, money, and effort,” said ATPCO President & CEO, Rolf Purzer.

“This is a real industry validation of Routehappy UPAs and UTAs and Routehappy’s ability to bridge the rich content gap in flight shopping. Airlines want a single source that offers a flexible, modern and affordable solution to manage their rich content,” said Routehappy by ATPCO CEO Robert Albert. “By bringing Routehappy rich content into NDC Exchange, we are helping airlines provide a consistent but highly differentiated shopping experience for the entire travel distribution ecosystem.”