What is GDS ?

GDS stands for Global Distribution System , it is a computerized reservation network which will store and process reservations globally for Car , Hotel , Flight, Bus , Rail or a Cruise and accommodates airline seating, hotel rooms, rental cars, check Cruise or ferries by travel agents or online reservation websites and large travel corporations. Usually it will be consumed by travel agents and some of big TMC (Travel Management companies) managing their own OBTs( Online Booking Tools) to book the reservations to any of travel for Specific GDS configured for each company for their users.

What are the features of the GDS system?

• Expose worldwide inventory of Airlines, hotels, cruise , cars etc.
• Access to B2B and B2C
• Purchase preferred seat and other services from specific carriers
• Expand travel coverage with single PNR with help of Travel agents or agencies
• Best fares and commissions, Customer loyalty
• Information maintenance and high availability at one place
• 24 * 7 *any day access to travel agents and TMCs for their customer business travels.

The below are few GDS System popular in market

• Abacus
• Amadeus
• Sabre
• Travelport
  • Apollo
  • Galileo
  • Worldspan

How travel platform works

Features of GDS API

•  24 * 7  travel Agents receiving bookings
• Connectivity to different GDS Systems
• Cloud scalability 
• Coverage of Services for TMC and Agents
• Nunit Test Framework library
• Wrapper extensions for data transformation

What we do

We have different PCC(Pseudo City Code) with multiple workspaces( SabreRed, Sabre-script, Galileo, smart-point)  and we constantly do bookings with different PNRs and analyze the API integration and extend our API features based on functional specifications and partner requests and expose our endpoints. Here are few features 

Sabre API

• Airfare explorer
• Itinerary Read, parse writeback different segments like Air, Rail, Car, Hotel and Cruise etc.
• Air availability, rules, Service Provider policies
• Itinerary Remarks, Alpha-coded remarks for grouping data, Active status
• Sabre currency services, for  providing rates in different zones from different vendors.

When to choose Sabre

Sabre provides 400 flight carriers, 10000+ hotels, 200 + travel operators for car and cruise Suppliers.

Sabre offer Booking engine for bus reservation.

Sabre offers high availability of B2B and B2C  business via sabre APIs

TravelPort

We have API integration to communicate with Apollo, Galileo and Worldspan Systems which will give flexibility under travel port.

We extend PRSL remarks formatting for OBT for agents who are using Galileo Desktops or Smart point integration to Online booking tools and perform segment writebacks.

Galileo is one of the GDS systems acquired by Travelport having 26% share or airline bookings.

It has more number of buyers and providers on this platform to provide lower operating cost.

Amadeus

Amadeus has more GDS capabilities having Transfers and Insurance modules apart from other GDS Systems and  based on our partner business requirement we recommend the GDS System.

Provides following flexibilities:

• Manage ease travel business 
• Reduces costs
• Improve revenue
• Buying experience.

GDS API Functionality Comparison

Current market share by GDS for various bookings

How to access GDS software?

We prepare the adapters and expose these adapter interface(s) which can be consumed by partners based on business needs. Here we design more adapters and expose the APIs as Microservices so that RestAPI communication will be most easier to implement and consume the WSDL with inbuilt documentation for the Asp.Net Web API 2.2  with OAuth support and out security wrapper will take care of partner validations to access these API,  If partner need more APIs to  consume like Car, Hotel and Rail we have  token scope mechanism validated against whitelisted domains with partner integration id.

Typical Workflow

Conclusion

Based on business needs we are ready to assist and extend capabilities of enhancing GDS API to quickly consume by avoiding complex parsing segments in the Itinerary for various GDS Systems, design, and provide solutions for a dashboard in configuring settings for parsing various things for GDS System and policies for TMCs and Agents.