ATPCO and TravelSky, the leading provider of information technology solutions for China’s aviation and travel industry, today announced that China’s largest GDS signed a five-year deal for both ATPCO’s pricing and shopping content. With this deal, TravelSky is now an ATPCO Basic subscriber of the world’s most trusted fare and pricing data and a subscriber to ATPCO’s Retailing Solutions, comprising Routehappy Rich Content, Ancillaries, and the Next Generation Storefront standards that are in development. The agreement will dramatically expand the reach of rich content throughout Asia.
TravelSky is currently testing all three Routehappy Rich Content types; Amenities, Universal Ticket Attributes (UTAs), and Universal Product Attributes (UPAs) and plans to integrate Amenities first into its OpenSearch airfare search engine to modernize and enhance its flight shopping display. TravelSky will work closely with ATPCO’s Retailing Solutions team and continue testing to determine customer preferences.
Amenities provide at-a-glance information about flight features while UPAs provide relevant media to describe an airline’s product and services by aircraft type, cabin, time of day, and more. UTAs provide easy-to-understand benefits and restrictions, like cancellation, refundability and boarding priority by fare.
TravelSky is one of the first channels in China to integrate Routehappy’s rich content. The Asian travel market is ripe for e-commerce innovation leveraging more user-friendly shopping displays. This deal underscores the universal clarity that standardized attribute datasets offer, so that travelers understand their choices when they shop.
“TravelSky understands that e-commerce is the future of selling in the Chinese market, and we want to serve our customers with a richer experience through Routehappy rich content that ATPCO provides alongside its trusted fares and rules data,” said Qiongwei Sun, Deputy General Manager, Airline Business Department at TravelSky. “With simple API integrations we are able to give our flight shoppers a next-generation purchasing experience with deeper information about the ticket and product attributes related to the flight they are searching, translated in either traditional or simplified Chinese.”
ATPCO has a rich history with TravelSky dating back more than 10 years, first partnering with ATPCO to open the North Asia Fares Support office, which helped onboard more than 20 Chinese carriers to distribute fare data via ATPCO. ATPCO then provided consultancy services as TravelSky began its journey to build an agency pricing engine five years ago. The new agreement will see TravelSky get all its pricing and retailing content from one source, making integration much easier.
“It’s an exciting new chapter of our partnership with TravelSky, going beyond ATPCO’s integral pricing data to integrate Routehappy Rich Content and fundamentally enhance the shopping experience for over a billion potential customers in China,” said Robert Albert, Executive Vice President of Retailing at ATPCO. “The differentiation of airline products is a worldwide trend and it's transforming our industry forever. Now, for the first time Chinese consumers get to say "ni hao" to modern flight shopping."
TravelSky is urging more Chinese and Asian carriers to partner with ATPCO in the creation and distribution of rich content so TravelSky can consume their Amenities, UTA and UPA content and get it in front of more passengers.
