In our “The Rise of Multisource” series, we’ve seen how the modernization of air distribution has made heterogeneous air content the “new normal” for today’s travel sellers. As we explored in our last post, adopting a multisource approach poses both opportunities and challenges. While sellers want to offer new airline options that travelers love, it’s not always a smooth journey. Many sellers struggle to make the most of multisource content, limiting their ability to innovate, improve customer experience, and grow their business. The time is ripe for disruptive – and positive – change.

Using air content from multiple sources sees travel sellers battle a formidable foe: Complex Inconsistency. They must confront different APIs, data formats, and workflows, which are difficult at best, and cost-prohibitive at worst. The struggle extends to post-booking services and order management, leading to longer processing times and errors as sellers attempt to execute the same change across sources. Most sellers’ current tech stacks can’t easily adapt to these new demands, which vary by business model and target market.

The rise of aggregators has certainly helped alleviate parts of the multisource problem. Aggregators save travel sellers from combining multiple air content sources with API integration and data normalization.

In its Travel Distribution Aggregator Market 2023 report, T2RL notes that “the recent push in the industry to retail modernization has handed airlines and aggregators a huge opportunity¹” and that “the more airlines remove content from the GDS and implement surcharges, the more opportunity the aggregators have to drive value to their subscribers and users².” By 2027 T2RL predicts “that the aggregator market will sell a significantly larger number of passengers than it did in 2022, in the region of a 17-fold increase³”.

However, what’s clear from today’s fragmented marketplace is that aggregation is not enough and falls short of fully addressing top-seller challenges. Sellers, for instance, still struggle with managing varying data sources and supplier relationships, navigating inconsistent post-booking workflows, and identifying the best offer for a specific traveler persona. And what of lost opportunity? Optimizing sourcing strategies and revenue/pricing can significantly enhance the seller’s bottom line. For example, what if sellers could easily:

• Strategically sources air content from hundreds of airlines without needing supply contracts or – even more compelling – selectively using their own seller contracts only where it most makes sense.
• Source the ‘best’ content from GDS, NDC, and direct-API (e.g., LCC) sources based on seller-defined rules that compare pricing, supplier options, premium content choices, and more
• Ensure a unified workflow in all channels, across all sources, including seamlessly addressing data gaps using NLP/AI for true ‘apples to apples’ agent/end-user experiences
• Dynamically apply mark-ups or discounts on air content depending on the seller channel

The above use cases are in high demand across the Sellerverse and, until now, reflect unmet needs. However, a new player has emerged that offers promising possibilities – the Smart Aggregator.

Smart Aggregators are poised to be new heroes in air retailing, rising to the challenge by streamlining and optimizing multisource distribution for travel sellers. With platforms that deliver unified workflows, seamlessly integrate with and revenue-optimize disparate content sources, and automate post-booking services, these Smart Aggregators are raising the bar.

Mystifly recently announced the rollout of its Smart Selling Platform (SSP) and launch-customer Costco, who like many air sellers today are looking to secure access to NDC content and protect their business from distribution change. Many more are following suit, attracted not only by the platform’s ability to unify air content from different sources including NDC, LCC, and GDS but also by enhancing post-booking servicing with automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP). With SSP, travel sellers can optimize their business models by source and channel for more revenue.

If you are a travel seller and want to learn more about the multisource air opportunity and how Smart Aggregator technology like Mystifly SSP can help, contact us today at growth@mystifly.com.