Apollo GDS for your travel application
Excited to travel to a destination with your beloved one on a vacation, or to attend some business meetings to crack a million dollars deal, or with some other travel purpose. To have a memorable trip you should be more focused on your destination.
What if you found some magical tool using which you can manage your entire journey like hire a car, book a flight with cozy seats, hotels. Not just it, you can add /delete or change your itinerary as easy as snapping your finger. Here comes a GDS that will help you out with all your travel needs.
Why Apollo GDS ?
Before moving to Apollo GDS, let’s understand the history of Apollo evolution first.
United Airlines was the airline that came up with Apollo CRS back in 1971. Almost fifteen years later, Apollo Travel Services became a standalone affiliate of United and was rebranded as Covia™. In 2009, Travelport became a collaboration partner in eNett™, a leading provider of integrated payment solutions for the travel industry.
Travelport combines three GDSs: Apollo, Worldspan, and Galileo. They are all merged into a single Travelport Universal API, the universal API is a package of the following functions:
Expansion (inventory and coverage)
Travelport GDS collects and distributes information across channels on access to airlines, rails, cruises, and hire rental cars. In addition to that, it allows for fetching information from available hotels and tours.
Travelport GDS is the only GDS equally covering all directions and continents. It is evenly represented in the Americas, though to a greater extent in South America, EMEA and the APAC region. In its distribution channel, Travelport combines 650,000 hotel properties, 400+ airline partners, 125 low-cost carriers, car rental units in over 38,000 locations, 50 cruise lines, and 15 railway carriers.
Flights:
Travelport gives access to booking direct flights, connected air and train routes, and ancillary services, such as baggage, meals, and insurance.
Hotels: Apart from basic hotel information and booking, Travelport can offer deals from non-GDS providers: Agoda, Tourico, and others to name a few. It also has support discounts for corporate clients.
Car rentals:
Travelport’s car rental functionality is standards are as follows
search, pricing, images, vehicle details, and cancelation.
Railways:
Travelport is heavily focused on providing combined air and train booking availability, including data on optimal connections with flights, ticketing air-rail as a single ticket, and offering train transfers directly to and from an airport.
API integration
- Air API connect
- Rail API connect
- Travelport rooms
- Fares and ancillaries
- Customer profiles
Travelport offers access to low-cost carriers via a Smartpoint solution. It returns information on branded fares and ancillaries and lists LCCs along with other airlines for quick comparison. The platform is available only for manual booking too via travel agents.
Read more to know how to connect to Apollo GDS
- Get IATA or ARC accreditation.
- Pass the GDS terminal training.
- Sign an agreement.
- Negotiate competitive deals.
Defiance of Apollo GDS
While discussing the power of Apollo GDS let’s take a glance at some challenges that we might encounter while using Apollo. Let’s see them one by one
- Option for One Way/Return/Multi-City ( Multi-City search provides an option to select multiple destination cities to search flight and book all flights in a single itinerary)
- Show the list of flights as per the XML Response received from GDS Server based upon search criteria.
- Application of Slice and Dice.
- Show Flight Logo, Flight Name, Flight Number, Segment Information, Departure Details ( City, Date, Time ), Arrival Details (City, Date, Time), Trip Duration, No. Of Stops
- Advance Filter Search
- Show Fare Details like Base Fare, Taxes & Fees, Grand Total Rate
- Show Baggage Information, Penalties Description, Refundable and Non-Refundable details
- Seat Selection Scope
Originally published at https://www.neovasolutions.com on May 6, 2020.
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