American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), the world’s leading B2B travel platform, announces upcoming customer pilots and rollouts for online booking of Air France and KLM NDC content across its proprietary solutions, Neo and Egencia. The new content will be enabled through Amadeus in a way that fully meets the requirements of corporate clients. This milestone will also help set a standard that can be used by the entire travel industry to ensure a successful and scalable launch of NDC-sourced content.
Like other major airlines, Air France and KLM are moving ahead with plans to promote the use of an NDC channel for content distribution. To help develop the robust and scalable NDC connections needed for business travel, Amex GBT has developed the Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) standard. The MMP is a list of requirements for NDC content distribution within the corporate travel ecosystem. The MMP standard has been welcomed by all ecosystem partners including airlines, technology providers and online booking tools with a majority adopting it to help develop their connectivity or APIs.
Amex GBT has a phased approach to adding NDC content to their marketplace, requiring airlines, distribution systems and online booking tools to meet MMP criteria. Carriers will be piloted based on their capability progress, then launched at scale across Amex GBT customers. Air France and KLM have met these criteria in full collaboration with Amex GBT and Amadeus. This will allow Amex GBT to enable Air France and KLM NDC content powered by the Amadeus Travel Platform for select Neo and Egencia customers in France. Amex GBT will continue to work with all partners to expand customer rollout as capabilities mature.
John Bukowski, Amex GBT’s VP of Content Acquisition and Strategic Sourcing said: “Our clients need solutions that support their travellers’ well-being and help generate savings. They expect the Amex GBT marketplace to provide added-value content that will not detract from the benefits of a managed travel program, regardless of its source. We have been working hard with Air France-KLM and Amadeus to deliver a robust, scalable solution to bring NDC offerings into our marketplace. Going forward, we hope this can be an example of how good partnerships and the MMP standard can help move the needle on modernizing air distribution for the entire ecosystem.”
Stéphane Ormand, Vice President Distribution Air France-KLM said: “We have collaborated closely with Amex GBT to develop a sustainable, scalable NDC solution for our joint customers in the Amex GBT marketplace. This has been a long-term commitment on both sides to deliver NDC together, and we are excited to start offering tangible NDC-enabled benefits such as continuous pricing and a more personalised experience for our joint customers.”
This development is the latest achievement in Amex GBT’s journey in creating marketplace value for its customers and partners. The company will continue to build on its foundational NDC capabilities which have been developed over the past three years with an aim to accelerate NDC adoption throughout the corporate travel ecosystem.
The Neo pilots will be activated in France and the Netherlands. Egencia will enable NDC connectivity for France.
