American Airlines, American Express Global Business Travel and Amadeus have announced what they are calling a “milestone” in travel retailing at the Global Business Travel Association Convention. 

The companies have processed live bookings using American’s NDC-enabled content with American Express Global Business Travel leveraging the new Amadeus Travel API and aiming to exercise its full functionality of end-to-end booking flow and servicing, including cancellations, exchanges and ancillaries, when capabilities reach scalable production levels.

This is an important step forward for airline retailing as three industry leaders demonstrate how collaboration is key to creating value and choice.

American will look to gain full benefit of the Amadeus Travel Platform through which travel companies like American Express Global Business Travel can provide access to the world’s most comprehensive and robust travel content.

“American is focused on offering our customers experiences that are unique to us and to them, and NDC puts us on that path,” said Alison Taylor, senior vice president of global sales and distribution at American.

“Today’s milestone is a significant step closer to making NDC-enabled content broadly available through Amadeus-powered travel companies.”

The ability to drive end-to-end workflow for NDC-enabled content from American demonstrates the importance and value of industry standards that are required to reach the point where travel agencies can shop, book and service NDC bookings at scale and match current performance levels. 

“The possibilities we have in business travel have never been more exciting as we work with our customers and partners on the evolving distribution landscape,” said Michael Qualantone, executive vice president of global supplier relations for American Express Global Business Travel.

“We are delivering solutions that will enhance access to content, improve transparency and shopping, and enable servicing capabilities with an end goal to drive value for our customers and partners.”

NDC [X] is a program dedicated to driving the industrialisation of NDC and to support its use for all travel players.

“We’ve now reached another critical milestone with two travel industry giants,” said Gianni Pisanello, vice president of the NDC [X] program at Amadeus.

“As we continue to progress toward delivering on our commitment to make NDC work for all stakeholders, we believe that standardisation across the industry is the single most important factor in easing implementation, broadening adoption, and creating a technical environment where airlines can explore new types of content, and travellers can readily consume it.”