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| Left to right: Sanchia Webster (Travelport Southern Africa Regional Manager – Hospitality & Car Rentals; George Harb (Travelport Southern Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe Regional Director); and Melissa Storey (First Car Rental's Executive Head of Strategy, Development and Marketing). |
From a new global distribution agreement with First Car Rental to a new agency desktop in Japan with AXESS International Network, Travelport is making a series of new moves.
First Car Rental in South Africa has signed a full content global distribution agreement with Travelport that gives Travelport-connected entities worldwide real-time access to First Car Rental’s rates and services. The partnership is effective immediately, with First Car Rental's full content now live on Travelport's Travel Commerce Platform on Galileo and Worldspan.
New Desktop With AXESS International Network in Japan
Additionally, Travelport has announced that it has partnered with AXESS International Network (AXESS), a Japanese GDS owned by Japan Airlines (JAL), to roll out a new agency desktop in Japan.
The upgraded agency desktop, which will be powered by Travelport, will be made available exclusively to AXESS-connected travel agents and will be known as AXESS CREA Advance. It will replace AXESS’ current CREA desktop.
The partnership between AXESS and Travelport was first announced in April 2012 when Travelport was selected as a technology partner on account of its alignment in strategic thinking with AXESS, Travelport said. Since then, the two organizations have been working in close collaboration to assess the needs of the region’s resurgent travel industry and design a new, enhanced Japanese GDS to meet the demands of Japanese travel agents and travelers.
The new AXESS desktop will be powered by Travelport Smartpoint, Travelport’s point of sale technology. Travelport Smartpoint offers extensive air, hotel and car content as well as a broad range of merchandising features, including Travelport Rich Content and Branding, which allows airlines to display and promote their entire product range, including their ancillary products and fare families, in exactly the same way as they do on their own websites. Travelport also offers a B2B hotel inventory of over 650,000 hotel properties, as well as a B2B payments solution offered through its payments partner, eNett. Once migrated onto the new desktop, AXESS CREA Advance-connected agents will immediately benefit from the additional content and technology.
In addition to delivering a new agency desktop, AXESS has also partnered with Travelport to launch a new business travel management solution, powered by Locomote technology, to meet the needs of the Japanese business traveller.
The overall AXESS GDS platform will continue to be hosted in Travelport's Atlanta data center.
