Travelport Signs Agreement to Bypass Emirates GDS Fee as Sabre Agreement Expires

Travelport has reached an agreement with Emirates that allows its agencies to avoid the carrier’s global distribution fee, which it began charging Thursday, Travelport announced.

Emirates earlier this year announced it would introduce a surcharge ranging from $14 to $25 per ticket on all global distribution bookings, in conjunction with the launch of new content and services through its New Distribution Capability-enabled direct-connect platform, Emirates Gateway. Under their new commercial agreement, Travelport agencies can access Emirates’ content without a surcharge via a new dedicated channel, to which they will automatically be upgraded. Agents also can access Emirates’ NDC content and services via Travelport’s Smartpoint platform and its RESTful/JSON application programming interfaces by signing NDC-specific agreements with both Travelport and Emirates, according to Travelport.

In addition, the agreement includes a long-term extension of Emirates’ use of Travelport’s Rich Content and Branding merchandizing tool as well as Travelport’s shopping and ticket rebooking technology.

Sabre’s agreement with Emirates, meanwhile, expired on Thursday, as was reported in June in The Beat. A Sabre spokesperson confirmed that Emirates’ content no longer was available via the Sabre GDS.

“We have disabled [Emirates] from the Sabre system services as of today,” Sabre said in a statement. “We are disappointed that [Emirates] is not committed to achieving a mutually-favorable agreement. We intend to continue to work towards a fair outcome that reasonably acknowledges the value that Sabre and our common customers provide to the airline.”

Also on Thursday, travel industry content aggregator and IT provider TPConnects announced that it had launched a new subscription-based marketplace in which airlines and agencies can buy and sell content using the New Distribution Capability standard. The Dubai-based company said its NDCMarketplace.com could connect dozens of NDC-certified full-service carriers and low-cost carriers along with GDS content to subscribers regardless of what schema or version they are using. Agents connect using their own credentials, so they can avoid GDS surcharges from Emirates and other carriers that impose them while keeping their GDS incentives.

The marketplace is meant to solve the challenge of agents having to connect with multiple airline NDC portals and various APIs, which has slowed NDC adoption by agencies, according to TPConnects CEO Rajendran Vellapalath.

“Agents have to switch between the screens to search and compare the best offers or end up paying additional surcharges for NDC bookings made through traditional channels or soon will end up paying a distribution fee,” he said in a statement. “NDCMarketplace.com is bringing content from both the traditional channel as well as the NDC and LCC channels in to one screen, combined with rich content from Routehappy, enabling the travel agents to leverage all the benefits.”

In the case of Emirates, an agency that was a Sabre customer could still access Emirates’ content in the marketplace by getting NDC credentials from Emirates, with no need to switch to Travelport or Amadeus, according to TPConnects VP of sales George Rajan.