It seems like almost every day there is an announcement from either Sabre, Amadeus or Travelport revealing another new airline has signed up for the travel tech giants’ different takes on NDC (New Distribution Capabilities). So much so, that it feels that they are the only organisations, outside of IATA, who have a stake into whether the programme is a success or not.

However, this is not always the case, as today sees Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) sign a long term agreement with Irish tech firm Datalex, in order to help the carrier put its digital transformation strategy into action with NDC, digital merchandising and ordering procedures across all of the airline’s sales channels.

“The right customer at the right time, via the right channel”

Kati Andersson, VP Digital Sales & Distribution at SAS said: “We are pleased to announce the selection of Datalex as the SAS partner of choice in our journey towards NDC capability. Our objective is to deploy a full NDC platform certified to the latest IATA standards. This will allow us to make the right offer to the right customer at the right time, via the right channel, on the right platform. Of course, all handling of customer data will be in compliance with GDPR.”

“We have the ambition”

“We have the ambition to deliver a digital customer experience second to none, and the Datalex commercial platform is a great complement to our existing digital capabilities and supports our business and IT strategy very well”, added Mats O. Eklund, VP of commercial IT & digital development at SAS.

Datalex CEO, Aidan Brogan, said: “We are delighted to partner with SAS on this exciting project. As a proven digital commerce platform for high volume travel retailers, we look forward to bringing a full cloud-hosted NDC platform to production with SAS, enabling its digital retail strategy to provide consistent, competitive and optimised offers across all sales channels.”