Spotnana on Thursday (10 August) announced a New Distribution Capability (NDC) direct connect with Lufthansa Group that will provide access to digital services provided by the group’s six airlines: Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Lufthansa, SWISS, Air Dolomiti and Eurowings.
The NDC partnership will give travellers and agents access to content such as Lufthansa Smart Offer fares, Green fares and continuous pricing. Added capabilities include personalised booking experiences, self-service changes, cancellations, comprehensive servicing and real-time global analytics via the Spotnana platform, according to the company.
TMCs can access the content via Spotnana’s agent desktop, which according to the company’s VP of partnerships Johnny Thorsen, can “eliminate the need to jump between multiple screens and perform repetitive data entry – so your operational costs go down while agent productivity goes up,” he said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday.
“Spotnana is the first company to solve the end-to-end traveller journey via NDC including servicing and duty of care, and we’re continuing to deliver additional capabilities with each new integration,” added Bill Brindle, VP of content and travel operations at Spotnana.
“Over the past few months our engineering team worked closely with Lufthansa Group engineers to quickly deliver comprehensive direct NDC integrations for multiple airlines in parallel,” he said.
Support for Lufthansa’s Green fares includes the ability to display the low-emissions fares side-by-side with other fare options “so your sustainable travel programme becomes a little more focused on lowering CO2 emissions whenever possible,” said Thorsen.
“We are now well positioned to work closely with our Lufthansa friends and start creating new fare bundles and offers which only can be provided via the NDC channel for the time being,” he added.
The travel technology start-up also revealed that the European aviation giant participated in its $75 million Series B fund-raising round last July. While the investment amount has not been disclosed, in a statement the companies said they “will work together to further develop strategies for modernising distribution”.
“Lufthansa Group is an exceptional partner that invested in our success early on, accelerating our ability to bring the benefits of modern distribution, seamless global travel experiences, and unbiased global content to everyone,” said Spotnana CEO and founder Sarosh Waghmar.
“We’re looking forward to partnering on additional innovation, and we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what we can deliver together.”
In a blog post, Waghmar said the company has “chosen to focus on building direct NDC integrations because this allows us to take advantage of every capability that is supported through a supplier's APIs".
This week, the company announced a partnership with Qantas to add travel management capabilities to the carrier’s revamped Business Rewards platform, and in June it launched a direct NDC connection with United.