TravTalk India Online Magazine
ForwardKeys has concluded a landmark agreement with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) to include their global ticketing data in its portfolio of products and data services.
Through this agreement, ForwardKeys will now provide global air travel data that leverages the world’s most comprehensive air transaction dataset from ARC and IATA. The new relationship will help ForwardKeys expand its current product offerings across customer segments in the tourism industry.
IATA is the global trade association representing some 290 airlines comprising 82% of global air traffic. IATA also operates the Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP), which facilitates and simplifies the selling, reporting and remitting procedures of IATA-accredited travel agencies in some 181 countries and territories, excluding the U.S.
ARC is an industry leader in air travel distribution and intelligence. It provides channel-agnostic tools and insights to enable the diverse omnichannel retailing strategies of its customers. In 2019, ARC settled $97.4 billion in transactions between airlines and travel agencies, representing more than 302 million passenger trips. Its flexible settlement and retailing solutions, innovative technology and comprehensive air transaction data helps the global air travel community connect, grow and thrive.
ForwardKeys will now receive a regular data feed of global ticketing transactions settled by IATA and ARC for travel agency bookings – including online travel agencies (OTAs) – as well as direct airline transactions. Customers will be able to search and query against all the segmentation and profiling criteria they are familiar with in the ForwardKeys platform.
Additionally, ForwardKeys will now greatly benefit from being able to offer its customers more granular segmentation of the data as well as access to a more comprehensive historical dataset.
Olivier Jager, CEO, ForwardKeys said: “This moment is like the completion of a jigsaw puzzle; we can now see the whole picture in complete detail rather than just part of it. Of course, I am excited for us because it strengthens our USP, but I am also excited for our customers because they will receive even more reliable market intelligence which will help them make better decisions.”
“Our mission is to serve our customers with versatile access to the right piece of information at the right time to help them understand and predict travellers’ impact on their business and this announcement today represents a major enhancement to that capability,” he added.
