CTW Network for

Airlines

CTW Network is the evolution of legacy air content distribution that gives airlines complete content and distribution control

Content Network
  • Combined shopping and direct distribution platform
  • Lowest cost, flexible commercial models
  • Displays all airline products and services
  • Real-time individual agency incentives/surcharges on fares and ancillaries
  • Real-time compute – guaranteed accuracy and bookability
  • Mass personalization – continuous dynamic pricing and unlimited bundling
  • Full NDC capabilities delivered today
  • Current Airline Distribution
    CTW Distribution
    CTW Network Distribution
    • Expanded product offerings: Branded fares, fare families, and all ancillaries – all offered from real-time pricing
    • Offer control: Airline offer creation through the CTW Platform
    • Dynamic pricing: The ability to choose any price point
    • New sales channel: Direct sales enabled with flexible distribution compensation capabilities
    • Self-service automation of reshop, refund, and exchange with 2 years up-to-the-minute historical fares
    The CTW Network provides the benefits of NDC via the traditional industry infrastructure
    • CTW Platform accelerates the goals of NDC without having to wait for industry partners to upgrade their systems in order to realize NDC benefits: gives the airline full offer creation control – dynamic pricing combined with the ability to distribute all fare brands, bundles and ancillaries today.
    • Airlines do not need to change their traditional processes and back-end systems in order to enable NDC.
    • CTW offers a cost of operation price point that airlines cannot achieve if they were to run NDC operations internally.
    • CTW is a designated GDS (1W) with the ability to consume/aggregate and redistribute any airline content including ATPCO, SPAs, PSS, or other custom fares to its subscribers.
    • Airline-designated subscribers can include any retail outlet that agrees to book directly with the airline through the CTW network.
    Booking, ticketing, and FOP fees as incentives/ surcharges (Flexible Agency Compensation)

    To compliment distribution flexibility – direct or indirect, CTW offers the ability to vary distribution compensation through the use of booking, ticketing, and FOP fees as incentives or surcharges. Airlines can provide incentives or impose surcharges by agency and by product according to the competitive landscape in different markets and to promote the sale of specific products.

    Combined Benefits of CTW Network and Flexible Agency Compensation
    • Making NDC (as a technology and business process) real today in order to work on the commercial models that will drive agency use.
    • Providing an environment in which the airlines can resolve all business process and commercial objections to the NDC business model: CTW is available as a sandbox in which to try out various agency commercial models without GDS interference.
    • Providing an offer creation platform likely less expensive (compute costs) than any of the airlines’ other alternatives, including in-house.
    • Creating the records necessary to enable post-ticketing servicing including reshop, refund, and exchange with full back-office compatibility.

    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.
    • 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.
    • Cash and points shopping - Loyalty Program fulfilment enhanced.
    • Multi-airline calendar shopping can display all partner itineraries.
    • Full control over content and distribution channels.
    Loyalty and Personalization

    CTW gives you the tools to create and distribute unlimited personalized offers using dynamic content with real-time pricing.

  • Integrate dynamic pricing as part of the shopping process
  • Ability to create unlimited number of profiles and offers
  • Shopping multiple fares and bundles based on customer or occasion attribute, e.g. display final price with correct number of bags and included seat assignment according to status level at time of shopping
  • Mix and match cash and points for fares and ancillaries
  • Fast real-time processing of Cat25 fare-by-rule unconstrained by caching
  • Fully compliant with existing downstream airline processed (e.g. revenue integrity, revenue accounting, airport servicing, automated refund and exchange, interline proration)
  • 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.