Amadeus and Lufthansa are now certified under IATA One Order, an initiative to modernise the flight booking experience.
Under the One Order approach, the customer is issued a single reference number for their journey, known as their Order ID, that covers all their flight and supplementary product documents (which have previously been handled separately).
One Order allows all travel products and services for a particular trip – even those of other providers such as partner airlines or third parties such as hotels and car rental companies – to be fully integrated under a single booking reference number.
The adoption of One Order has been made possible by IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard, which is using the XML standard to modernise the systems communications between airlines and other travel service providers.
Lufthansa’s One Order certification from IATA follows the completion of a one-year pilot project at the airline in collaboration with Lufthansa Systems. The project’s objective was to conduct the product offer and booking process solely based on NDC and One Order.
Meanwhile, Amadeus has achieved certification on the One Order standard as a capable Order Management System.
With this, Amadeus says it will provide airlines with more flexible dynamic offers, greater personalisation, more seamless shopping, delivery, and real-time financial flows.
Beyond the technology, the transformation also ushers opportunities to simplify and enhance airline business processes, organisation and culture, Amadeus said in a statement.
Fabrizio Calcabrini, executive vice president, Airlines Solutions, Amadeus commented: “Amadeus is… working towards alignment across the industry. We have always said that industry change will only happen if there is close collaboration between all travel players.”
In 2017, Amadeus partnered with British Airways to conduct the first proof of concept using One Order messages in a live production environment and shared feedback with IATA to contribute to the evolution of the standard.
Amadeus is now planning a second proof-of-concept in 2019. The One Order certification reinforces Amadeus’ commitment to its NDC-X programme, created to drive the industrialisation of the NDC standard for all travel players and improve business capabilities for the airline industry. Navitaire, an Amadeus company, also achieved One Order certification as an Accounting Provider earlier this year.
