NDC Guide

This guide discusses general NDC support in the JSON APIs and provides a chart of high-level differences by API. The API references provide object-level details on differences in usage or responses. Throughout the help, differences in how NDC and GDS content are requested and returned are noted where applicable.

Related Content: JSON APIs Guide, NDC FAQs

In this topic:

• NDC Basic Concepts
  • What is NDC?
  • General NDC & GDS Differences
• NDC in the JSON APIs 
  • General Support
  • Prerequisites
  • Participating Carriers
  • Supported Forms of Payment
  • Filed Fares, Passive Booking Record, MIR
  • NDC by Country
  • Carrier Specific Notes
  • NDC Content for Apollo and Worldspan
• NDC and GDS Functionality Comparison Chart
  • General
  • Search
  • AirPrice
  • Ancillaries
  • Seats
  • Standalone Fare Rules
  • AirReservation
  • Remarks & Service Requests
  • AirTicketing
  • Air Modify and Exchanges

NDC Basic Concepts

NDC (New Distribution Capability) is a travel industry standard for the distribution and retailing of flight content. NDC is not a system, database, or piece of software - it is a standard for exchanging data.

What is NDC?

The Travelport JSON Air APIs support both NDC and GDS content, or simply NDC and GDS. These terms refer to the content distribution method:

• GDS stands for Global Distribution System. A GDS aggregates and distributes air, hotel, and car rental content such as schedules, fares, and upsells. Travelport owns the Galileo, Worldspan, and Apollo GDSs, which are also known by the IATA abbreviations 1G, 1P, and 1V.

• NDC is for New Distribution Capability, a program launched by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the trade association for the world's airlines, to facilitate content distribution directly from airlines to online travel agencies. NDC is an XML standard for exchanging data, and is intended to replace the EDIFACT protocol that has been used by Global Distribution Systems (GDS). NDC distributes content directly from airlines to online travel agencies, GDSs, and travel management companies. NDC content is provided and fulfilled directly by the airline, and may include differentiated content available only through the airlines' direct channels.

Although most JSON API workflows, requests, and responses are the same for both GDS and NDC, airline-specific processes do create some differences. Some functionality is supported only for NDC, or only for GDS, as detailed later in this guide. Because NDC is available only to provisioned customers, this online help has a separate NDC top-level menu to group information and processes that apply only to NDC.

General NDC & GDS Differences

• NDC is a shopping-led workflow so there is no availability data. Inventory and price are not guaranteed until the booking is fulfilled.
• NDC supports the ability to send frequent traveler data at shopping (sent in the Search API request in the CustomerLoyalty object).
• In NDC the airline controls all data available, including offers, booking, storing, servicing, fulfillment, and ticketing.
• Involuntary changes are sent using order change notifications and don’t use the AIRIMP codes HK/TK. (Involuntary changes not currently supported in the JSON APIs.)
• NDC generally allows 20 to 30 minutes to create a booking (the offer time limit). Note that per FAQs and Best Practices, Travelport retains a search in cache for 12 minutes so it can be added as an offer to the workbench. A workbench is valid for 30 minutes and must be committed within that time window or it expires.
• NDC and GDS ticket time limits are the same; a booking will expire if ticketing doesn't take place within a certain time, usually within 24 hours of booking. NDC airlines do not generally return ticket time limit data.
• NDC has two ticketing models: Issuing the ticket on the airline's own stock or using FLX stock.

NDC in the JSON APIs

Most workflows, requests, and responses across the JSON APIs work the same for both GDS and NDC content, with minor differences noted in the help where applicable.

The exception is that changes to the air itinerary, and voids, exchanges, and refunds, are handled by separate JSON APIs and follow different workflows. This results from differences in how NDC carriers implement these processes.

The NDC menu at the top of every page groups these NDC-specific APIs. Otherwise, all Guides and API References apply to both NDC and GDS.

General Support

The following table outlines broad areas of support in the JSON APIs. More details are provided in the following sections.

NDC Item	Supported in the JSON APIs
IATA NDC schemas	17.2, 18.1, and 18.2
Itineraries supported	Single airline on a booking, multiple passengers
Payment	Cash, credit card, and banked funds (see Supported Forms of Payment below)
Settlement	ARC and BSP
Travelport booking file	Passive segment (ZK)
Mid and back office	MIR/TAIR (DI lines)
Services	Search, AirPrice, Seats, Ancillaries, AirReservation, AirTicketing, Reservation Divide, Air Modify and Exchange, Reservation Cancel, Ticket Void and Refund

Prerequisites

To access NDC content you must be provisioned for NDC with Travelport and registered with the NDC airline. Validation occurs at these levels when a request for NDC content via any JSON API is received:

• Validation that the requester is provisioned for NDC within Travelport.
• Request details are sent to the airline system. Airline validates that the requester is registered with them for NDC content.
• Aggregated NDC and GDS content is returned as requested.

Participating Carriers

The JSON APIs have been certified to provide NDC content from the following carriers:

• Qantas (QF)
• United Airlines (UA)
• American Airlines (AA)
• Singapore Airlines (SQ)
• Air France (AF)
• KLM (KL)

Information about additional carriers will be provided here as they join.

Supported Forms of Payment

The forms of payment and credit card types accepted for NDC content varies by carrier. The tables below list the forms of payment and credit card types supported by each carrier.

Form of Payment Support by NDC Carrier

Airline	Cash	Credit Card	Debit Card
Qantas (QF)	Yes	Yes	Yes (handled same as credit card)
American Airlines (AA)	Yes	Yes	Yes
United Airlines (UA)	No	Yes	Yes (UA does not differentiate between credit and debit cards)
Singapore Airlines (SQ)	Yes	Yes	Yes (handled same as credit card)
Air France (AF)/KLM (KL)	Yes	Yes	Yes (handled same as credit card)

Credit Card Type Support by NDC Carrier

Airline	Visa	Mastercard	American Express	Diners Club	JCB	UATP	Discover Card	Universal Air Travel Card
Qantas (QF)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
American Airlines (AA)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
United Airlines (UA)	Yes	Yes	Yes (except CO)	Yes (except GB, SE, IN)	Yes (US & JP only)	Yes (US and others, limited)	Yes (US and others, limited)	No
Singapore Airlines (SQ)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Air France (AF)/KLM (KL)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No

Filed Fares, Passive Booking Record, and MIR

In the traditional GDS distribution channel, Travelport issues the ticket using the GDS ticketing system, while for NDC the airline itself issues the ticket and handles payment and any subsequent changes. Because the NDC carrier maintains its own booking record (also called a PNR), Travelport maintains on its host system a passive booking record or passive PNR . This passive PNR generally mirrors the carrier PNR and allows the JSON APIs to return and store information about the booking. At applicable points in the booking workflow, the JSON APIs synchronize this passive booking record with the carrier's booking record.

With AirReservation 23.11.34 and later, the following handling is applied to filed fares in the passive PNR:

• Updates handling of filed fare details so that if the price changes between the time of booking and ticketing, the passive booking record reflects the updated price at ticketing.

• Updates handling of filed fare details so that if there is any change in the itinerary (date change, time change, routing change, etc.) and the airline exchanges the original ticket for a new ticket, the filed fare for the original ticket is canceled and replaced with the filed fare for the exchanged ticket. This ensures the exchange is handed and reported per ARC/BSP standards and that the same information is sent to the MIR (management information report) and the back office system. (In the BSP market, when the original ticket is exchanged for a new ticket, the fare is collected either as a NO ADC or an ADC. In the ARC(US) market, the fare is created with the total values which includes base fare, taxes and total fare.)

In addition, AirReservation 23.11.34 added support to generate a MIR (management information report) for ticket issuance, ticket exchanges, and ticket voids for NDC in the same format as currently exists for GDS ticket issuance and exchange. This ensure consistent mid- and back-office reporting and handling for NDC as well as GDS itineraries.

NDC by Country

NDC carrier content is available for booking through the JSON APIs in the countries listed below. NDC content is rolled out on a country basis, so check back if your country is not listed, or if content of interest is not available.

Where NDC content is available, your Travelport account manager will ensure you have been enabled for the content. You may need to register directly with the airline to gain access to the NDC content.

Carrier Specific Notes

Qantas:

• Sending customer loyalty numbers (CustomerLoyalty object) in the Search request is supported only for Qantas. If sent, the response returns the CustomerLoyaltyCredit object in TermsAndConditions.
• When running a multiple passenger search, Qantas supports only these PTCs: ADT, CHD, CNN, INF. Sending any other PTC may result in an error at ticketing.
• Qantas supports only one account code. If multiple codes are sent, only the first code is processed.

United Airlines:

• UA returns baggage text in TermsAndConditionsAir/BaggageAllowance/BaggageItem.

Singapore Airlines:

• Singapore Airlines returns tax codes but not tax descriptions in responses.
• OB fees are added to the total fare only if a credit card BIN number is provided in the AirPrice request. If this is not done, and a credit card is then used to ticket the booking which had been held without an FOP or with a FOP different from the one subsequently used to ticket, then ticketing will fail due to price mismatch. Support will be added in a future release to support this workflow and ensure the ticketing does not fail.
• Singapore Airlines charges OB fees when a credit card is used as a Form of Payment in the following point-of-sale countries: United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Belgium. For these countries, OB fees are charged when provided with BIN number at the time of Price. OB fees are added to the offer price when the booking is created.

Air France and KLM:

• Billing address is required with a debit/credit card form of payment.

• Some Private Fare support must be requested using special PTCs (passenger type codes):

  • For VFR (visit friends and relatives) Private Fares, the fare request in the UK market must use PTC JCB (ADT), JNN (CHD), or JNF (INF).

  • For Tour Operators, the supported passenger types are IIT, INN, and ITF.

NDC Content for Apollo and Worldspan

NDC and GDS Functionality Comparison Chart

Travelport is an active participant in NDC while still providing a single, consistent workflow for searching, booking, and managing travel. As the NDC technology continues to develop, the JSON APIs handle certain functionality differently between NDC and GDS.

In the traditional GDS distribution channel, Travelport issues the ticket using the GDS ticketing system, while for NDC the airline itself issues the ticket and handles payment and any subsequent changes. Although the general JSON API booking workflow is the same for both GDS and NDC, voids, exchanges, refunds, and certain modifications are handled by separate JSON APIs and use different workflows. This results from differences in how these processes are implemented by the NDC carriers. Seats, ancillaries, and EMD payment processes can also differ for NDC and for individual NDC carriers.

The NDC menu at the top of every page groups these NDC-specific APIs. Otherwise, all Guides and API References apply to both NDC and GDS with differences noted where applicable. General differences are noted in guides, while object-level differences are noted in the API reference for each API.

The following table charts functionality differences between NDC and GDS in the JSON APIs.