AVIAREPS and Air Black Box have announced a commercial agreement to promote Air Black Box’s industry-leading “Third-Generation Interlining” solutions across AVIAREPS’ global airline, airport and online travel agent (OTA) customer base.
As airlines relaunch their services and restore their networks, legacy interlining processes and structures dating from decades ago are no longer fit for purpose in enabling airlines to partner effectively or allowing consumers to find the most convenient and cheapest flight connection options. Air Black Box’s ACE and ThruBag™ solutions create a new way for airlines to cooperate and for passengers to benefit.
Air Black Box’s Third-generation Interlining solutions combine content from network airlines, low-cost carriers and even surface transport providers, allowing airlines and travel agents to offer their customers a wide range of convenient virtual interline journey options that aren’t available elsewhere. In response to search queries from an airline booking site or a metasearch engine, ACE automatically combines the flights, aligns ancillaries like baggage allowances, creates the bookings, and handles all payment and settlement.
Air Black Box’s first-of-a-kind baggage solution, ThruBag™, allows connecting passengers to check their baggage through to their final destination airport, even if they are travelling on separate tickets. Until now, the inability for passengers to check bags to their final destination has been a significant disadvantage of virtual interlining and self-connecting travel; ThruBag removes that “pain point” for airlines and their customers.
Air Black Box’s technology integrates with multiple airline reservation systems and provides an NDC-compliant distribution interface for easy connection to OTAs, TMCs and other distribution channels. Air Black Box holds the highest level of the New Distribution Capability (NDC) certification, Level 4 of NDC 20.1, guaranteeing its airline customers easy connectivity to a wide range of distribution channels and reservation systems.
“In a post-lockdown world, airlines need to find new partners to grow their networks and generate more revenue and traffic, simply and quickly. Relying on traditional alliance or codeshare partner carriers is cumbersome and constraining,” said Rick Howell, CEO of Air Black Box. “Our solution opens the doors for network airlines, low-cost carriers, and other travel providers to cooperate easily, quickly and effectively, with minimal integration in either software or process. With its extensive airline relationships and global reach, AVIAREPS understands the connecting travel market intimately and is an obvious partner to bring our solution to more airlines. We’re delighted to be launching this partnership as the travel market begins to recover.”
“From our in-depth relationships with airlines around the world, we can see that it’s more important than ever to quickly respond to the needs of the industry and unlock new revenue-generating opportunities,” said Edgar Lacker, CEO of AVIAREPS. “We believe that Air Black Box’s third-generation interlining and ThruBag baggage check-in solutions will allow airlines and airports to do exactly that, and we are excited to partner with Air Black Box to bring this capability to our airline and airport clients.”
