Travelport, a leading distribution services and e-commerce provider for the global travel industry, today announces that Short’s Travel Management, a top 50 mid-size TMC company, known for in-house development of state-of-the-art technology solutions, has recently completed a refresh of its corporate booking tools which use Travelport’s Universal Application Programming Interface. Travelport’s Universal API provides access to a broader range of travel content allowing travel applications such as corporate booking tools to more closely emulate what online leisure travel and airlines are doing on their web sites.

According to David LeCompte, CEO of Short’s Travel Management, “The main reason we are using the Universal API is to access more content for corporate travelers, like upgraded economy airline seats and non GDS-hotel content.  By bringing this much broader range of content into our corporate booking tools, businesses will realise cost and time efficiencies by providing more choice to their travelers through their corporate travel program. This single API delivers access to more content and integrates into our current GDS ticketing processes, providing all of the travel management control and data companies require from their TMC.

Added LeCompte, “Travelport Universal API allows Short’s corporate travel booking tools to provide more content with consumer-friendly options to our corporate travelers with a similar shopping experience found on leisure travel or airline websites. Many corporate booking tools are not getting updated often enough. Ours is fresh and innovative with new features and there’s a lot of value in that.  As a result, we are drawing interest from other TMCs.”

According to Scott Hyden, managing director, Americas, Travelport, “We’re pleased to work with Short’s Travel and help them take advantage of the breadth of functionality and content available through Travelport Universal API. Travelport’s Open Platform philosophy means the investments we make in new content such as Travelport Rooms & More, aggregated shopping, airline ancillaries & rich content & branded fares are exposed to agencies coding against Universal API as well as to agents using our desktop tools such as Travelport Smartpoint.  Coding to our Universal API is a relatively easy means for corporate booking tool providers and many others to advance their products.”