Skift Take
Online travel agencies have been late to the airline sector push to sell airfares and other products in more modern ways. Travix has reached a milestone, though, with the help of tech firm Amadeus, and its story suggests the outline of future trends.
Many airlines have unbundled plane tickets to sell a range of extras, such as early check-ins and Wi-Fi access, on their websites. But they've struggled to persuade travel agencies and tech vendors to sell their fares and extras in similar ways.
Corporate travel agencies have made halting progress toward meeting airline demands. For example, earlier this year, TripActions began adopting so-called next-generation storefronts, as urged by American, Delta, and United.
But airlines now want online travel agencies to get with the program.
Case in point is Travix, an online travel agency group owned by BCD. Travix's 500 employees run consumer-facing leisure brands, such as Vayama, Vliegwinkel, and Flugladen, in more than 50 countries.
This month, consumers at all of Travix's brands began seeing and booking air content powered by the modern technical standards airlines prefer.
Content from 16 airlines, such as Finnair and Qantas, have been integrated into the back-end within the computers at Amadeus, a third-party distributor for about 500 airlines.
Travix and Amadeus are ramping their effort up slowly.
"We'll be at 1,000 tickets a day pretty soon," said Travix CEO John Mangelaars.
By the end of the year, Amadeus expects to release the first version of this API (application programming interface, or method of exchanging data), that online travel agencies can use to access what Travix has now. Travi
