Avianca to Adopt Travelport’s Rich Content and Branding

Avianca, a leading airline in Latin America, has entered into a new distribution partnership with Travelport that will see Avianca become the first major carrier from the Latin America region to adopt Travelport Rich Content and Branding, a key component of the Travelport Merchandising Platform.

Carlos Durán, VP of Marketing and Sales Avianca, said, “Participating in Travelport’s merchandising platform will allow us to customize our product display and content within the latest version of Travelport Smartpoint, the industry-leading travel agency point-of-sale application. This provides enhanced functionality which allows Avianca to include product descriptions, images and branding information for eligible itineraries via Travelport Smartpoint.”

Since launching in 2011, Travelport Smartpoint has been adopted by more than 110,000 travel agents worldwide. The success of the application is its ability to offer users a blend of graphical and cryptic user interaction alongside a range of time-saving features: improving the agent user experience, reducing training costs, and speeding up the reservation process.

This agreement builds on two previous agreements between the two companies which provides Travelport-connected travel agents (Galileo, Apollo and Worldspan) with complete, global access to the group’s best fare inventory; and a technology services agreement providing Travelport Rapid Reprice across multiple distribution channels, fully automating the manual process of repricing and reissuing airline tickets when passenger itineraries change.

“We’re delighted to build upon our existing partnership with Avianca,” said Christopher Engle, Travelport’s vice president of Global Distribution Sales & Service, Americas. “This agreement makes clear Travelport is executing its merchandising strategy: to enable airlines to distribute their fares and ancillary content in a manner they choose; to do so through the travel agency channel and; to do it in a way that protects the integrity and efficiency of the GDS booking and management process for travel agents.”