Air Canada plans to go live with NDC content within Sabre in the coming weeks. And, the airline is doing away with a surcharge on legacy GDS bookings for all but the lowest fare classes in each cabin.
Air Canada last year implemented an NDC strategy that offers incentive payments for NDC bookings and assesses a surcharge on legacy GDS bookings.
Air Canada says the strategy has helped it reach a total of more than 600 agencies that are now booking the airline via digital modern merchandising technology.
But now the surcharge will go away for most fare buckets. The surcharge of $21.50 for legacy bookings in Amadeus and Travelport and $24.50 in Sabre now only applies to the G, K, A and P fare buckets.
The Sabre launch, for which the airline did not designate a specific date, will come one year after the companies reached a distribution agreement last June. For now, Amadeus remains the only major GDS in which travel agencies can book NDC-enabled Air Canada tickets and ancillaries. The airline reached an NDC agreement with Travelport last October but has yet to complete an integration.
Travel advisors can also access Air Canada's NDC content via direct connects, specialized NDC aggregators and the Air Canada Connex desktop system.
The carrier continues to pay a $2 incentive per flight for agency bookings via NDC direct with Air Canada and selected NDC technology partners.
The airline also said Monday that it will double its risk-free refund period to 48 hours for NDC bookings in the coming months. And it will begin to offer dynamic fares late this year.
Dynamic fares are continuously generated, providing price points that aren't available via legacy GDS technology, which can only support 26 alphabet-coded fares per flight at a given time.
Air Canada said that a variety of servicing improvements will be added to its NDC platform over the next year. They'll include support for disrupted customers; new features for the handling of involuntary changes; the ability to apply unused tickets for future travel; and more payment options for international markets.
Carbon offsets will also be made available for purchase over the next 12 months.