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CTW Platform for

TMC/Corporate
Consolidators
OTA/Metasearch

Tomorrow’s retail challenges solved today
  • CTW Platform is a retailing and distribution platform that dramatically improves agency commercials with:
    • GDS economics preserved by retaining the option to book in a GDS and receive incentives
    • Avoided excess message fees as all shopping occurs on the CTW Platform
    • Self-service automation that avoids or reduces call center calls and transaction times
    • Virtual Interline and cheaper, more diverse GDS content to improve top-line revenue
  • CTW Platform is built on a solid foundation of market-proven technology. Its creators are shopping algorithm experts who have built platforms that now serve over 20% of the global market.
  • Designed from a blank slate but building upon more than a decade of knowledge and experience, the newest architecture leverages the latest hardware and infrastructure to deliver unmatched features and performance.
  • Proven in benchmark study against legacy systems to return lower fares and the greatest diversity of flight options – all with guaranteed bookability.
  • OTAs can easily enable Virtual Interlining with LCC and NDC content embedded in the CTW platform to expand any agency business model and gain a competitive edge.
Delivering NGS Capabilities Today
Next-generation travel store initiatives to modernize online travel retailing will take years to materialize. CTW achieves all of these objectives today:
  • Displays the full content of a complete offer on a single screen to avoid subsequent searching for a traveler’s specific requirements and prices.
  • Allows distribution channels to better sort and find airline products and services tailored to consumer needs.
  • Provides a consistent description of offers with a defined set of common attributes to facilitate a comparison of a set of airline products and services across carriers in a single display.
The CTW Platform
  • Greatly expands shopping and self-service capabilities and displays any and all combination of airline offers.
  • Easily handles the data explosion caused by the ever-expanding airline products and services to deliver unmatched performance at any scale.
  • Guarantees accuracy and bookability through real-time pricing – no cache.
  • Does not have any look-to-book limitation or excess message fees – allowing the travel retailer to focus on the customer experience rather than cost management.
  • Turbocharges mobile apps with streaming results and an extensive set of filtering tools
The most powerful self-service automation for reshop, refund, and exchange

CTW Platform enables a high level of call center automation that significantly reduces transaction call times and eliminates losses due to manual pricing errors. The Self-service Module of CTW Platform can be set up as a stand-alone service, with integration times measured in weeks, not months.

Reshop instantly calculates all available itineraries allowed by the original ticket rules and displays the add/collect or residual/refund amounts for each option in one step. A great tool to avoid call center calls as travelers enjoy seeing and knowing the price of all alternatives immediately without a protracted call.

The Evolution of Air Travel Shopping
  • Early shopping platforms focused on sorting air tickets by lowest fares.
  • Airline retailing has evolved with fare brands, bundles and ancillaries – but their attributes differ among carriers and some carriers now have 20+ brands.
  • Shopping platforms have struggled to keep pace, creating booking funnels to add ancillaries in multiple steps, but other than CTW no one can display all airline brands and ancillaries on a single screen to allow travelers to quickly compare prices for the exact travel experience they seek across carriers.
  • Thus, the shopping platforms today still largely attract low fare travelers – leaving large market segments to shop on various airline platforms. Travelers’ dissatisfaction with online shopping sites runs much higher than on airline storefronts.
  • Today’s shopping engines frustrate travelers, suppliers and retailers because they operate based on limited legacy platforms that lack the capabilities to search, retrieve, and organize common attributes across carriers.
  • CTW’s advanced retail capabilities empower travel retailers who want to expand their addressable market beyond budget shoppers to service higher-end leisure travelers and corporate clients with specific business requirements.

Features and Benefits

Accuracy
  • Integrates shopping, reshopping, pricing, and repricing in a single Offer and Order management system.
  • Highest level of compliance with ATPCO rules, IATA mandates, and carrier exceptions of any vendor.
  • Always real-time pricing. No cache. Ever.
  • Complete interline shopping capabilities including ATPCO and SITA fares.
  • Intra-day fare updates and immediate fare suppression for domestic and international fares.
  • Up-to-the minute accuracy on historical fares and rules going back 24 months.
  • Full IATA tax processing for fares and ancillaries, including all country exceptions.
  • Real-time schedule changes based on actual aircraft movements
  • Full slice and dice and complete rule validation during shopping
  • Never a discrepancy between shopping result and final pricing.
Content

With its powerful technology, CTW Platform displays all relevant content at the time of shopping, not further down the booking funnel, to allow travelers to easily compare flight options and attributes. Traveler shopping can now be directed toward the exact travel experience desired and not just to the lowest fare with basic fare attributes. Travelers can book online, exchange or refund their tickets without need of an agent/call center – decreasing distribution costs and/or call center costs. This significantly enhances customer satisfaction. CTW Platform adds interline shopping capabilities to an airline’s online storefront – significantly improving and growing the global network over which the carrier can sell its inventory. It allows carriers to more fully utilize SPAs, codeshares and interline agreements.

  • Branded fare shopping for single airline and interline itineraries.
  • Fare and flight attributes at the time of shopping (e.g. refundability, change fees, seat maps, seat attributes, aircraft amenities, fare brand attributes).
  • Full paid baggage menu at the time of shopping.
  • Seat map with associated charges at the time of shopping.
  • Complete a-la-carte ancillaries menu at the time of shopping.
  • Rich content from Routehappy.
  • Associated ticketing and booking (OB) fees at the time of shopping.
  • Shopping for RTW/CT fares.
  • Group fares.
  • SITA fares for comprehensive interline content.
  • Cash and points shopping - Loyalty Program fulfilment enhanced.
  • Multi-airline calendar shopping can display all partner itineraries.
  • Full control over content and distribution channels.
Virtual Interlining
The modules of the CTW Platform work together to make Virtual Interlining a valuable add-on that can be deployed right out of the box.
  • CTW’s powerful shopping algorithms eliminate the need for complex and expensive caching and cache management.
  • All connections and calculations are done in real time.
  • Ability to orchestrate multiple tickets in the same order and keep order elements in sync.
  • Flexibility to customize fare break points and stopover processing to create VI itineraries even with GDS-only content that go beyond simply combining two OW tickets.
  • Ability to integrate multiple content sources: traditional airlines (ATPCO and SITA fares), LCCs, NDC APIs, other private fares and direct connect.
  • Comprehensive support for any agency tools to manage markups, commissions, and fees.
  • Self-service automation of reshop, refunds, and exchange with powerful Cancel/Start Over feature which is of great value when reshopping virtual interline trips.
Self-Service

Reshop instantly calculates all available itineraries allowed by the original ticket rules and displays the add/collect or residual/refund amounts for each option in one step. A great tool to avoid call center calls as travelers enjoy seeing and knowing the price of all alternatives immediately without a protracted call.

  • All the functionalities of CTW shopping are available in the reshop transaction.
  • Supports all exchange/refund scenarios: reissue, revalidation, partially flown, totally unused, no show, prior to or after departure, etc.
  • Multiple reissue/revalidation supported.
  • Change of fare break, change of fare airline, change of POS, change of plating carrier.
  • Process tickets originally priced and issued by agencies in any GDS.
  • Reshopping of IT/BT tickets.
  • Group fares, RTW/CT fares.
  • Reshopping of time of day/same day domestic fare, international fare and rules.
  • Dynamic pricing as part of the reshopping process.
  • Complete a-la-carte ancillaries menu at the time of reshopping, including reshopping existing ancillaries from the original itinerary.
  • True One Order capabilities, keeping every order element in sync.
  • Fully compliant with existing downstream airline processes (e.g. revenue integrity, revenue accounting, airport servicing, automated refund and exchange, interline proration).
  • 24 months of historical fares and flight schedules with up-to-the minute accuracy.
  • Can be used as an instant revenue integrity tool between airlines and agents at the time of booking, thus eliminating ADMs.
Performance and Scalability

Other systems rely on caching and all sorts of tricks to limit content in order to improve average performance times. The days of serving cached answers to repeat questions are numbered. CTW Platform is built for the future and delivers true mass personalization by shopping all airline content in real-time, including brands, ancillaries, FBR, private fares, and multi-carrier calendar.

  • CTW technology already powers 20% of worldwide GDS issued tickets.
  • Returns all brand combinations and all a-la-carte ancillary services in the shopping response without caching.
  • Displays all reasonable flights without artificially imposed limit on the number of itineraries returned.
  • No requirement for pre-polling in order to boost average response time.
  • No minimum system load required to achieve performance targets.
  • Returns all fare types including private fares, Cat 25 FBR, SPA.
  • 7x7 real-time calendar shopping for multiple carriers without caching.
  • 30x30 real-time calendar shopping for single carrier without caching.
  • Streaming results for enhanced mobile distribution and better customer experience.
  • Same unrivaled performance for shopping and reshopping.
  • Linearly scalable architecture – double the hardware gets you twice as many transactions per second (TPS).
  • Can be scaled to any number of TPS required.
  • Separate independent instances can be installed in different locations with any size hardware footprint.
Reliability and SLAs

Multiple instances running simultaneously in different locations ensure seamless instant failover in case of disaster. CTW Platform is designed to avoid single-point-of-failure components. Best of all, CTW Platform is backed by SLA guarantees on accuracy, bookability, performance, and system availability.

  • Price guarantee on shopping and reshopping results.
  • Price guarantee on reshopping and repricing results.
  • Bookability guarantee of shopping and reshopping results.
  • Performance guarantee on the shopping and reshopping results.
  • Performance guarantee on the pricing and repricing results.
  • System availability guarantee.
  • Separate instances of the Platform can be located on premise in the same data center as the airline PSS and/or booking engine provider.
Price and Flexibility

Our pricing structure frees you to design great customer experiences for your travelers rather than trying to manage technology costs. No commercial inhibition to shopping transactions or look-to-book constraints. Flexibility in business models that go beyond transaction fees to “all you can eat” dedicated environments and licensing opportunities with customization capabilities.

  • Transaction costs aligned with business objectives; pricing based on issued tickets and completed transactions.
  • No look-to-book excess message fees.
  • CTW Platform offered under flexible business terms designed to serve any type of user.
  • Transaction fee model with shopping charges based “per ticket” charges at a much lower price point than any current vendor.
  • Tickets and EMDs can have multiple PBs and passengers.
  • Refund/Exchange and Reshop charges based on completed transactions and not queries.
  • Fare auditing without completed transactions are priced at low query charges.