Known Issues and troubleshooting

Airline-specific NDC information is found in the airline's NDC knowledge base article. Visit Travelport Support, search for the airline (for example, search NDC SQ.

• Air France / KLM

• American Airlines

• avianca

• British Airways

• Iberia

• Lufthansa Group

• Qantas Airways

• Qatar Airways

• Singapore Airlines

• United Airlines

Smartpoint Desktop

• Smartpoint Desktop Grid View does not support NDC bookings.

Air search

• Search results are truncated at 250 results in order to maintain performance. In the case you do not see an expected fare, please use shop modifiers to narrow your search. This limitation will be resolved in a future release.

• Due to the 250-result limitation, there are certain instances where some applicable carriers may not be visible in the shop results list even when they may have fares available. For the best user experience when doing a carrier agnostic search we recommend targeted searches when possible, using desired cabin class and selecting specific airports rather than specific cities. In a future release, this functionality will be improved to ensure all relevant results are returned.

• Options are available to print the shop results and options to print the itinerary from the Booked air confirmation screen. Clicking on Print Booking will allow you to choose a printer or print to a PDF file. There is a known issue in some operating system environments where the print output gets truncated in the second page if user selects physical printer option instead of PDF. If this happens, we recommend printing to a PDF file.

• For some itineraries, Singapore Airlines (SQ) and Qantas Airways (QF) might not return all the details around brands and attributes.

• Intermittently on BA and AF/KL searches, flights for a round trip journey display in reverse order. The dates of each segment display correctly, however, the return flight options are shown first.

• For BA NDC Basic and Plus Fares, the brand attributes are not always returned.

• To see private fares for Air France (AF) or KLM (KL), select Any private fare on the search panel.

• BA returns any private fares an agency is entitled to without the need for the agent to enter an account code during Shop. BA does not accept account codes for NDC.

• SQ itineraries cannot use the Passenger Type Code (PTC) of CNN. The booking will fail.

• UA do not return branded fare information in an NDC search.

• American Airlines on Apollo or Worldspan:

  • Supports only ADT PTC is supported, along with shop, price, book, ticket, remarks, cancel, and traveller update.

  • Open jaw not supported.

  • Some return flights are missing from the search results.

Traveler information

• The NDC Flight search currently does not support the Undisclosed Gender option. This issue will be updated in a later version.

• Phone type "C" for Cell is currently not supported. Type "M" should be used for Mobile or Cell as noted in Book NDC Flight. The support of type "C" is being discussed for a future release.

• American Airlines on Apollo or Worldspan:

  • Adding Corporate ID to the held booking returns an error, but the Corporate ID is present when you retrieve the PNR. The error message to customer is “FIN or IGN”.

  • In order to have traveler data automatically populate into the form, the PTC associated with the traveler’s name and the PTC selected in the search form must match exactly. By default, travelers are assumed to be adults (PTC of ADT) unless a different PTC is specified in the name remark.

• For BA, when a name is entered in Travelport+ as Lastname/FirstnameTitle with no spaces, the title is not recognized and is treated as part of the first, or given, name. This causes an error at time of booking.

• For AF/KLM:

  • One email of type FROM is mandatory, which is considered as Agency Email. If the request does not include one FROM email type, NDC bookings on AF/KLM fail and the error Travel agency contact email address missing displays.

  • Multiple FROM type email addresses are not permitted. Adding multiple FROM email addresses returns the error message Multiple FROM Email is not allowed.

Multi-passenger servicing

• Bookings with Infants (Passenger Type Code 'INF') currently fail during Modify (reshop pricing) for all carriers. This will be resolved in an upcoming release.

  

• Certain Passenger Type Code (PTC) combinations may result in an error, depending on NDC airline support. (e.g., ‘SRC’ and ‘INF’ will error). These will gradually be resolved with airline support.

• There is currently no ability to pre-populate the Shop form from the Host Profile of AAA, though certain passenger details will still auto-populate in the Traveler Information section. There will be an enhancement for this capability in a future release.

  • If agents want to match passenger details that are in AAA, they will need to manually match PTC’s and # of Passengers at Shop or there may be some synchronization mismatches.

  • Passenger information (other than PTC which is dependent on what is shopped and priced) will still populate in Traveler information screen. (i.e. If there are 3 passengers in the AAA and an agent shops for 2 passengers, the last passenger in the AAA will automatically be removed and the first 2 will auto-populate in the Traveler Information section).

• There is currently no ability to add multiple membership numbers at shop. There will be an enhancement for this capability in a future release. (Note: For NDC carriers that apply personalized discounts based on Membership, currently NDC carrier pricing for all passengers is based on the highest tier).

• The order of multiple passengers currently differs between plugin and DI Lines. Ticket numbers are assigned to passengers in alphabetic order by surname. The ordering in the DI lines is by ticket number sequence. Any INF (infant without a seat) is associated to a particular ADT (adult) passenger by the Passenger Number. For example, if there are four ADT and an INF is associated with third ADT, the INF sequence is P31, meaning 3.1, associated with third ADT.

Seats and ancillaries

The Seats topic contains a list of known gaps.

• Seats are available on AA and QF NDC segments. Paid seats must be selected before ticketing. Free seats can be selected before and after ticketing.

• When selecting seats in the pre-book flow, passenger information for each passenger must be included on the host booking file before searching for flights. Add passenger names (N.), phone (P.), and email (MT. or MF.) using terminal entries.

• The ancillary shopping cart in the passive segment is also interactive, indicating that the agent can book ancillaries for the flight. However, NDC ancillaries are not yet supported.

• It is not possible to modify seats in ticketed bookings from paid to free or paid to paid. Only from free to free.

• American Airlines on Apollo does not support seats at this time. Please use aa.com to book seats.

• For LHG, paid seats cannot be paid instantly. Seats must first be held, then follow up with payment to issue the EMD.

• For BA, when adding a seat to an existing held booking, the agent must first put the seat on hold then issue payment for the air segments and seat.

• United Airlines seat map display issues: some aircraft configurations display incorrectly, but the ability to book the seat remains intact.

• Adding paid seats to a UA NDC ticketed booking returns an error.

Book and ticket

• NDC content CANNOT be added to an existing booking with any GDS content. Adding NDC content to an existing booking may result in mismatched data, errors or canceled segments. This will be supported in future releases.

• The plugin does not currently support the addition of new air bookings (GDS or NDC) into a single PNR. Adding GDS or NDC flight bookings to an existing NDC PNR may result in mismatched data, errors, or canceled segments. The agent can modify the segments, however this will result in a repriced itinerary so the existing seat, class of service, etc. could change.

• Ticketing in this currency not allowed. This error message displays because the HMCT (assumed city) must be in the city of the PCC when ticketing details are added to the host. The HMCT must be corrected in Smartpoint before creating a booking file. For more information, in a terminal window enter HELP HMCT or refer to the Assumed City section of the Sign On page in the Travelport+ Formats Guide.

• When an AF/KL order is retrieved, penalty rules are not displaying correctly; only credit card information displays.

Modify and cancel

• Some airlines allow you to cancel ticketed bookings and bank the funds to be used towards payment of a new ticket. Refer to Cancel with a refund and bank the funds.
  For airlines that do not support canceling ticketed bookings, the option is available to select ‘cancel’ and display the amount that may be available to be refunded if the cancellation was permitted. However, the next screen will advise that cancel is not permitted. This is working as designed in order to add the cancellation process once it is permitted.

• Agents cannot currently use a private fare account code when attempting to modify a booking. For held bookings, agents will have to cancel and start the workflow over to use the account code. Post-ticketing, there is no way to add a different account code, so the agent would need to contact the carrier to apply a different private fare account code.

• Currently when an agent cancels or modifies a booking, the total refund amount shows within the NDC graphical view and the DI Lines, but does NOT break-out the associated change fees. This will be enhanced in a future release.

• It is possible that a PNR is canceled or modified using the NDC graphical view, however the passive PNR has not been canceled or modified due to system timeout or system errors (i.e., "simultaneous changes") and will be out of sync. In this scenario, the booking is successfully canceled on the carrier end, but the graphical view will respond with an error if agents attempt to retrieve the PNR in the graphical view again. The passive booking can be canceled manually but modification issues must be resolved directly with the airline. This fix is in progress for an upcoming release.

• When an open-jaw booking is modified, Smartpoint still displays a stray ARNK as the last itinerary line. This ARNK can be removed in Smartpoint.

  

• If a booking is canceled outside of the Travelport system (i.e., directly with the carrier or when past the ticketing time limit), this will not be shown as canceled in terminal view. If the agent attempts to retrieve a booking that was canceled externally, they will receive an error (example below). Error verbiage may vary depending on the airline.

  

  Future enhancement to be coordinated with the airlines to sync back in this scenario.

• An agent can cancel a passive NDC segment using cryptic entries and will not receive any warning message to inform them to cancel via the NDC graphical view. Please ensure all changes are made via the NDC graphical view or the airline will not be informed of the changes.

• Agents cannot currently access an NDC Booking File from the queue or they will receive an error. Please exit the queue before trying to retrieve an NDC PNR if using the plugin.

  

• For QF reservations, in some cases the Flight Search and the Host PNR are not synching correctly. When attempting to cancel the reservation, a Something went wrong error may display on the plugin. Upon exiting and reentering the plugin, the booking is canceled on the plugin, but still active on the host. If this happens, enter the following host commands separately to cancel the reservation:

  • XI

  • R.

  • ER

  To work around this issue:

  1. Create QF reservation via the plugin.

  2. Close the plugin. In the host window, enter the command IR until NDC content has changed banner is displayed in the host.

  3. Cancel the booking in plugin. Both carrier and host PNRs are canceled successfully.

• For AF/KL reservations, if cash is the form of payment used on a hold ticket, the agent is unable to issue ticket after modifying the itinerary.

• In some cases, when AF KLM revalidates the ticket for an involuntary change, the NDC icon in Smartpoint Desktop might remain amber. Please check the DI lines to confirm the change is processed and the ticket number is still present.

• For some Apollo NDC ticketed bookings, the ticket numbers are not displaying in the PNR, which causes the NDC icon to remain orange. When orange, you cannot open the PNR in the plugin and cannot make any changes, voids, or refunds. A workaround is to add the TRMK remark with the ticket number in the NDC format. Once added, the icon turns green, and you can open the PNR in the plugin.

  In this example, the TRMK remark adds the ticket number for passenger 1 segment 1:  #TAS01#TKT/P01/S01/0018036165319

• For LHG, current implementation to modify ticketed orders cannot be exchanged multiple times, only one exchange supported.