Travelport

Unlike its competitors, which typically all expanded out of a single core code base, Travelport’s history is marked by aggregation. It took over several systems with varying geographic and functional strengths:

• Apollo: Originally developed by United Airlines, it has strong roots in the USA and was traditionally the system of choice for United and its partners.
• Galileo: Originally developed by a group of European airlines (from BA and KLM), dominant in the UK and Europe.
• Worldspan: Originally developed by Delta, Northwest, and TWA, it was the engine of choice for some of the first online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia, because of its e-commerce-friendly architecture.

For years, Travelport had to maintain these three separate cores. A travel agent using Galileo would not be able to easily “talk” to a travel agent using Worldspan.

To address the fragmentation problem, the company introduced Travelport+, a multi-year strategic transformation plan. Instead of simply keeping the legacy mainframes in place, Travelport+ uses a unified, microservices-based architecture to replace the heavy lifting of the three legacy cores.

• One API: Developers are no longer having to choose between the Galileo API or Worldspan API. These are connected to one Travelport+ API.
• Content Aggregation: The platform is designed to allow the mixing of traditional GDS content (EDIFACT) with new NDC content and Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) feeds into a single display, making the “fragmented shelf” problem much easier for agents.

Travelport comes to position itself less as a passive pipeline and more as an active digital marketplace. They have been aggressive in their adoption of NDC (New Distribution Capability) in the hope of being the first GDS to provide a truly seamless means to compare a traditional fare against a complex NDC bundle on the same screen.