Travelport Pushes Forward in Advanced Distribution Panorama

Global distribution system provider Travelport in recent years has evolved its product offering, acquiring online booking tool Deem while launching Travelport Plus, a unified distribution platform that it recently enhanced with new search abilities, while working with airlines to distribute New Distribution Capability content. Travelport CEO Greg Webb during the recent Global Business Travel Association annual convention in Atlanta spoke with BTN managing editor Chris Davis about the company’s efforts to simplify what he considers a business travel landscape that is increasing in complexity. Edited excerpts follow. 

BTN: It’s been almost 18 months since Travelport acquired Deem. What’s the status of the integration, and what are your plans for it?

Greg Webb: Travelport before I got here had a corporate online booking tool, which they eventually got rid of. I didn’t necessarily strategically set out to move back into the OBT space. At the same time, when we looked at Deem, we really did believe it was the best product out there and that with all the things that were going on in the industry, it would be a good fit in the portfolio. 

It was owned by Enterprise Holdings, so it was doing some things specifically for Enterprise. … We [thought we] just needed to focus on the things that Deem does well and make them do that better. It took about a year in terms of real integration of staff and technology into the Travelport realm, but that went very smoothly. We’ve completed all that, and we’ve been very happy with it, and we think strategically it will continue to do very well. Kyle Moore now is the general manager there, and the strategy he’s laid out with the Deem team aligns with what we talk about more broadly, which is the theme of modern retailing, which is trying to make the complex simple and trying to make sure that it starts with the consumer.

BTN: In terms of Deem’s global footprint, are you where you want to be, or is further expansion planned?

Webb: Deem today is primarily North America-based, but we absolutely have expansion plans. We think it fits nicely into a number of what I would call first-cut countries that it’s basically ready for today, and we’ve got a list of expansion plans after that. So, I think we’ll absolutely take advantage of getting a larger global footprint. 

BTN: Is there a timetable on that? 

Webb: We’ll most likely say something later this year.

BTN: What’s the status of client migration to Travelport Plus?

Webb: We’re 100 percent done with everything that’s non-U.S. In the U.S., we are kind of mid-80ish percent in terms of complete. We’ve got some of the more complex guys that will happen in the third and fourth quarter of this year. I don’t want to overcommit, but we’ll be more than 90 percent complete by the end of the year in North America, which means overall [we’ll be in] the mid-90s of complete with the upgrade to Travelport Plus. And so we should be complete in 2025.

BTN: And in terms of the prior GDSs?

Webb: In terms of Travelport Plus the platform, that’s not a destination, that’s a journey. We’re going to continue to enhance and update the overall platform as it grows as our next-gen system. 

BTN: You’ve continued throughout this year wrapping in especially foreign carriers with more NDC programs. How is that progressing?

Webb: It’s progressing really well. Since the beginning of the year we’ve signed and in many cases implemented Etihad, Emirates—which just went live a month ago—Qatar, SAS and Virgin Atlantic. So, it’s been a steady stream. 

NDC is supposed to be a standard, but it is a standard in name only, in that every carrier implements differently. We’re getting better at making sure we start with a standard template associated with the schema that they happen to be running and then build off that. We’ve also built some tools on our side to make sure that, post-signature headed toward implementation, we know the right questions to ask. Ask better questions, and you get better answers, and I think over time, not just us, but the industry has gotten better at asking the right questions about how carriers want to implement their version of NDC.

BTN: Do you see a lot of variance in those versions of implementation?

Webb: Yes. Despite the fact there are a handful of tech vendors that provide the software around it, the actual implementation, on an airline-to-airline basis, there’s a decent amount of variation. And that’s even on what I would call a standard implementation. Different carriers have different objectives that they’re trying to effectively use the technology to push through the new NDC standard. For some it’s ancillaries, for some it’s bundles, for some it’s dynamic pricing. As the objectives change the look and feel of the implementation changes. 

BTN: Is the NDC share of volume increasing?

Webb: It is increasing, and we expect it to continue to increase even more moving forward. At some point we expect it to start getting more rapid growth, instead of going a couple of points at a time, you’d expect it to jump.

BTN: Is it a couple of points at a time now?

Webb: Yes, but it depends on the carrier. Different carriers are moving faster, some are moving significantly slower. In some cases, it depends whether the carriers are being aggressive—less of a carrot, more of a stick. 

I think NDC should move at the pace of both suppliers getting what they want out of it, which means better being able to put their offering through the channel in a way that makes sense, and a better buying experience for consumers. You can’t have one without the other. If I was trying to get happy travelers, I think the growth of NDC on the sell side should be based on the fact that I’m able to better offer things that consumers want.

BTN: What do you make of American Airlines’ recalibration on this, and do you think it has a broader impact beyond American?

Webb: In a broad sense, it’s no secret that the airline community has had a direct-to-consumer push over a very long period of time, 15 years or so, maybe longer. As travel gets more complex, we sit here at GBTA and everybody here travels all the time, and we know how to buy. … That’s not the general consumer. The general consumer flies maybe one time a year. And the idea of restricting their choice to a single carrier with a single way to look at it in this complex world today just becomes more and more impractical for the infrequent flyer.

Because if you’re going to take your family of four on a vacation and you get one day of vacation a year, the idea of, “Well, I’ll just go look at pricing on one airline” makes zero sense. Most consumers spend hours and hours. We did an informal study at an airport, and there were crazy answers on “How much do you shop before you purchase a leisure trip?” The answers were astounding: “I shop seven different websites 21 times over four weeks before I make a buying decision.”

There are perfectly good use cases for why people should go to an airline’s website. You do it all the time, simple point to point. There are lots of reasons that they should certainly consume those travelers in a direct-to-consumer manner.

On the other hand, there are a lot of very complex things [for which] it makes sense to comparison-shop, to spend time talking to an expert, to make sure you have the best research you can find. And that doesn’t lend itself to that. I think what American got themselves wrapped up in was an idea of trying to really break consumer buying behavior. Ultimately, I think that’s what required a bit of the recalibration, which was just, “Hey, we still want to be where travelers are. We still want to make sure that we have supportive partners in the industry, supportive resellers of our product and people that can be advocates.” And I think at some point they decided they needed to make sure that they still had advocates in the industry for themselves and their product.

BTN: Did American share any thoughts with you now that they’re back in EDIFACT channels?

Webb: We have from beginning had a very strong partnership with American. We were willing to do whatever we needed to from a technical perspective to make them successful in the market. We continue to do that, and ultimately I think the issues that they ran into weren’t issues we were involved with, they were issues with others in the industry, so I think you’ll probably get a better answer from someone else. But we continued to, during that entire time, do what American needed us to support their strategy.

BTN: How are you with Travelport’s position in GDS booking share?

Webb: Over the last four years we’ve continued to grow share steadily. I think we’ll continue to do that. We’ve been really happy with the way that our product rollouts have gone recently. I think our vision for where we think the technological layers of [the industry] is going, our focus on making sure that we are going to be the best multi-source content aggregator out there, and that our use of both the core components of the technology and also some of the things that we’ve just announced, like the Content Curation layer and Content Optimizer, along with our use of AI and machine learning we think will give us an advantage.

BTN: We’ve been talking a lot about air, but how about hotel? As chains look at attribute-based selling, are you prepared technologically if they want to start differentiating?

Webb: We’re in a good place on hotel, but we haven’t talked about this very publicly. But we think there’s opportunity in the hotel space, and behind the scenes have been spending time [on this] on the Travelport Plus upgrade. We’re completely replatforming our hotel components. And as we do that, all of the things that you’ve talked about—attribute shopping and selling, the ability for us to do cross-sell and upsell componentry in a better way than we have—we can do it today, but we’d like to be more efficient in the way that we do that. So we believe that that market will continue. 

It’s another [area] where it’s getting more complex, and when you put complexity into it, the thing that you really want to drive, what consumers really look for is somebody to simplify that complexity. And I think there’s space out there to do that.