TOURVIS, the South Korea-based online travel platform, has become the first OTA in Asia to implement NDC (New Distribution Capability) with Air France-KLM.
It is celebrating the milestone, reached on June 28, with discounted fares and waived ticketing fees on all routes from July to August.
The new capability gives the Korean OTA, which is part of the TIDESQUARE group, the lowest fare real-time confirmation and ticket issuance for Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in the market.
The integration allows TOURVIS to provide real-time lowest-fare searches and ticket issuance for Air France and KLM flights. In addition to standard information like departure and arrival times and flight duration, additional ancillary services, such as seat selection, meal reservations, and in-flight free Internet access, will be continuously introduced.
Boris Darceaux: Further collaborations for new services in the future.
Boris Darceaux, General Manager for Korea, Japan, and New Caledonia at Air France-KLM, said, “We are very pleased to have conducted the first NDC direct integration in Asia with TIDESQUARE TOURVIS. This partnership enables us to offer our customers more diverse and innovative travel products and services. We plan to explore further collaborations for new services in the future.”
The promotional event running until August 31 covers all Air France and KLM routes, including destinations like Paris, which will host the Olympics for the first time in 100 years, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Madrid.
Additionally, payments made with Samsung, Hana, Lotte, Shinhan, KB Kookmin, or KakaoPay will receive an instant discount of up to 15%.
Air France celebrated its 40th anniversary of operations in Korea last year by introducing Boeing 777-300 aircraft with new business-class bed-type seats equipped with doors on the Incheon-Paris route.
TOURVIS achieved NDC Capable Level 3 certification in 2018 (the highest level at that time, one of seven companies worldwide), and NDC Aggregator Level 4 certification in 2019 (the highest level at that time and the 13th company globally to be certified). In May 2019, TOURVIS became the first in Korea to launch directly connected NDC content.
Since then, TOURVIS has started full-scale technological partnerships and completed NDC direct integration with a total of 11 airlines, including Lufthansa (LH), Singapore Airlines (SQ), Emirates (EK), and American Airlines (AA), becoming the OTA with the most NDC integrations in Korea as of the first half of 2024.
TOURVIS CTO Seung-il Hong said, “NDC is bringing revolutionary changes to airline ticket reservation and distribution, and TOURVIS will continuously strive to provide the best values to our customers at the forefront of these changes. This achievement is another example of how TOURVIS technology and services can create positive mutual synergy with world-class airlines like Air France-KLM.”
TOURVIS also offers selected services in partnerships with luxury hotel memberships, holding 99% of Japan/Europe transport passes, and offering Korean Air mileage accumulation.