New travel tech start-up, Trans-end, is having a busy time with enquiries from agents looking for access to kulula content, after kulula’s sudden announcement to the industry this week that it was exiting the GDS and that Trans-end was the recommended local kulula content aggregation platform read here.
Agents can access the airline’s content through its distribution aggregator partners, Travel Fusion (an international company) or Trans-end (a local company). Travel News spoke to Trans-end ceo and founder, Louis van Zyl, to find out more about the company’s new agent booking platform and its capabilities.
Louis said the seed for the company had first been planted back in 2016, while he was still coo of Tourvest Travel Services, learning about NDC content and how airlines intended to move away from expensive GDS distribution in favour of NDC distribution through cheaper API connections.
Seeing that a gap existed for a local tech company to help agents transition into making more NDC bookings while also maintaining their access to GDS content, Louis and his team founded Trans-end in 2019 with the intention of creating a local booking platform that focused on incorporating both GDS and non-GDS content for all the airlines that service the sub-Saharan region.
Trans-end now boasts that it is the first and only Iata NDC level-four-certified company in sub-Saharan Africa. At present, its booking platform offers both Amadeus and Sabre GDS content, as well as five direct connect channels that are already up and running. These include BA International, Lufthansa, Air France, Hahn Air and now kulula. According to Louis, Trans-end is on the verge of adding a number of other direct connections with large NDC-certified foreign airlines (including a large Middle Eastern carrier) and is also working on creating connections to non-NDC LCC and regional airlines, such as Lift.
As a locally developed booking platform, Trans-end also gives South African agents the advantage of competitive rand-based pricing, local support and level-two B-BBEE certification. According to Louis, agents are charged a sign-on fee, a basic monthly fee and a PNR transaction fee to access Trans-end’s content. He says its offering is significantly more affordable (in the double-digit percentages) than its international competitors’ pricing.
Agents can access Trans-end’s content in two ways. Trans-end either sets up a tailored white label site for the agent to access its booking engine or agents can access the Trans-end API and integrate it in their own internal booking systems.
The platform also integrates seamlessly with Amadeus and Sabre. This means that if a consultant makes a direct connect booking in the Trans-end booking system, this will automatically create passive segments for the booking in the GDS, allowing agents to continue to view all their bookings in the GDS.
“Agents can sometimes be reluctant to move off the GDS, either because they are in a comfort zone using these systems or because of GDS commercial incentives that pay them for every GDS segment they book. The downside of this is that GDS fares are undoubtedly the most expensive fares and these agents are passing these costs on to their clients, sometimes without even realising how uncompetitive their rates are. At Trans-end we are providing a way for agents to transition from high percentages of GDS bookings to a position where their direct connect bookings become more prevalent. Our booking tool is fairly unique as very few other tools offer such a wide scope of content for agents to access in one platform, which integrates multiple GDS content with NDC direct connect content,” said Louis.
Monique Diez has been appointed Trans-end’s sales and marketing partner. Monique has previous experience heading up sales development for both Sabre and Travelport and has a number of years’ experience running her own consultancy, MD Dynamics.
