Significant enhancements to Travelport's Smartpoint tool will enable agents to become “much more knowledgeable” about the rapidly expanding range of airline products, delivering greater value to their clients.

A year ago, the travel technology provider committed to enable airlines to connect with it in the way that they chose, to increase the range of ancillary products available to agents and to create a richer visual platform for airlines to display content “in a way they have never been able to display it before”.

Head of global supplier strategy Ian Heywood told Travel Today that it has successfully delivered on all three fronts.

“We’ve stuck to timings and everything is moving forward very positively,” he said, adding that the product has completed its testing phase and is now being rolled out in multiple countries including Australia.

This year, the airline signed four of the world’s largest low cost carriers  – Ryanair, Easyjet, Tigerair and AirAsia – to its global distribution system using a universal application programming interface (API) connection which enables “customer-centric selling”.

While many full service carriers continue to connect using industry standard connections, Heywood confirmed they have also started making the move to achieve the additional flexibility championed by the International Air Transport Association’s New Distribution Capability  (NDC) plans. American Airlines and WestJet have already signed up.

“But we are having lots of conversations with other airlines,” he said.  “The whole NDC is API-paced, so the wider airline industry is definitely talking about working through APIs.”

Travel agents can now access LCC fares through an aggregated screen providing them with the speed and efficiency that are key to keeping costs down, Heywood explained.

The incorporation of ancillaries also aims to help agents easily sell unbundled airline products enabling agents to strengthen their customer service proposition and, ultimately, their relationships with clients.

Access to all of this additional information is now achieved through a more visual platform that displays airline content in a new way, while enabling agents to easily book and also be more knowledgeable about what airlines have on offer.

“As unbundling continues in this industry, this is just going to be become more and more complex, so the role of the agent is just going to become harder and harder as they try to stay knowledgeable about a particular airline’s product,” Heywood said.

“All of the marketing information is uploaded by airline – they decide what is being shown to agents, not ourselves. So the airline would put in a sales message and information about what the agent could be telling the customer to encourage them to buy that fare, or the next fare up.”

The advent of a number of new aircraft types such as Airbus A380s and Boeing 787s means that agents need to rapidly become familiar with an burst of new onboard product, which is where this platform steps in. And while the system has been designed not to “bombard” the agent with too much information, it gives them the option to access additional details if required.

“If it’s an airline that the agent is not booking on a regular basis, then they may want to go in and look at the information in much more detail,” Heywood said.

“It’s a key benefit for an airline when not selling in its home market and the travel agency community not so familiar with the product.”

Vice president global distribution and sales Damian Hickey underlined the difficulties airlines have previously experienced in providing agents with that level of education.

“Traditionally, they’ve had teams of sales people going out there and educating agents, or sending them brochures or faxes which is costly and not very effective,” he said.

“But the information that they see here is in actually in their workflow at the time of sale so it isn’t about finding that Easyjet brochure somewhere – this will actually bring it up at the time you need to know.

“This information makes travel agents much more knowledgeable and adds a lot more value without airlines having to go to the expense of trying to educate them.”