Virgin Blue has chosen Navitaire’s New Skies distribution, reservation, travel commerce and departure control solutions to support its long-term business plans. Terms of the contract have not been disclosed.
Under the agreement, which enhances and broadens services provided by Navitaire under a previous multi-year contract, Virgin Blue will convert to the New Skies platform later this year. Enhanced services will provide Virgin Blue with new capabilities, including fully integrated ancillary travel sales, advanced guest recognition and expanded codeshare and inter-airline partnering.
New Skies provides capabilities for integrated internet booking, call centre reservations, travel agency global distribution connectivity, inter-airline and alliance codeshare itineraries, real-time reporting, ancillary revenue generation and departure control.
Virgin Blue plans to use the New Skies platform to help: boost profitability and revenue with flexible ancillary service offerings for car-hire, travel insurance and other functions, all integrated directly into the booking flows; expand revenue-generating inter-airline and codeshare services by aligning with an extensive network of airlines partners; create new product and market offerings to reach high-yield and leisure travellers by incorporating customer-centric data throughout the entire guest lifecycle; provide comprehensive day-of-departure passenger services through advanced guest recognition capabilities; and optimise the combination of seat revenue and guest satisfaction by offering New Skies’ proprietary ‘Intelligent Seating’ capabilities.
“New Skies supports our long-term growth and our commitment to provide the best value for money by supplying the platform to let us create differentiated, high-value services for our guests across every customer touch-point,” remarked Brett Godfrey, Virgin Blue CEO. “New Skies has the features, the built-in ancillary revenue capabilities, the broad airline alliance and GDS capabilities and the flexible architecture to give our evolving carrier a competitive advantage now and in the future.”
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