Travelport: Modern Travel Retailing

Over the years, travel distribution has evolved significantly. The options for transportation, accommodation and customisable trip add-ons continue to grow by the millions, and legacy technology that travel retailers use cannot keep up. This leads to complex workflows that make the experience of searching, booking and managing a trip overly complicated and frustrating.

At Travelport, we power travel bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers such as airlines, hotel properties, car rental and rail companies. Our Travelport+ platform ultimately gives the industry the power to help people see the world.

The Travelport+ platform is the only modern retailing platform built for travel agencies and provides them the capabilities to operate as modern digital retailers. We work with partners that share our passion for delivering exceptional experiences to travelers and provide easy ways for airlines, hotels, rail and car rental companies to connect through personalized content to agencies and travelers. Our modern retail technology allows agents to quickly compare millions of trip options and easily identify the best offers for their travellers. Additionally, Travelport+ empowers suppliers by simplifying how they connect and deliver travel-relevant content, offers and ancillaries, no matter the source, seller, or how it is consumed.

Travelport+ is intuitive, fast, and centralises information at agents’ fingertips so they can provide more personalisation, better self-service, and simpler trip management. Travelport-connected agents have access to tools to control new content for screen customisation (similarly to Amazon’s top picks) with tailored content to save agents’ valuable time, optimise revenue, and unleash a new approach to profile management.

Earlier this year, we decided to put our cutting-edge Travelport+ platform to the ultimate test by making the world’s most complex trip simple. Partnering with Jamie McDonald, British adventurer better known as “Adventureman”, we challenged Adventureman to set a new world record to visit the 7 Modern Wonders of the World, relying solely on public transport. Travelbag, a travel agency and long-standing partner of Travelport, booked all aspects of Adventureman’s trip using Travelport+, utilising the latest tool, Smartpoint Cloud, for effortless itinerary creation, search, comparison, and filtering.

Spanning an astonishing 22,856 miles, Adventureman crossed four continents, touched down in nine countries, took 13 flights, and relied on 16 taxis, nine buses, four trains, and one toboggan. This remarkable journey to see all 7 Wonders of the modern world was confirmed as an official Guinness World Record with a time of 6 days, 16 hours, and 14 minutes. After a challenging few years for the travel industry, this trip demonstrated Travelport’s digital excellence, while setting the stage for a future in which travel retailing is elevated to unprecedented heights.

Our team has the insight, experience, and fearlessness to challenge what’s been done before, seize opportunities, and drive the industry into a bold new era. That is why being honored with a UK Business Tech Award would not only validate the work our entire team has put into making Travelport and the Travelport+ platform what it is today, but this recognition would also motivate our entire workforce to continue to push the status quo.  

At Travelport, we are on a mission to simplify the complex industry we have known and loved for decades. Where others add features, we invent new solutions. Where others are beholden to certain partners, we are unconflicted. While others wait for the future to happen, we race towards it. By focusing all our energy and expertise on connecting buyers and sellers of travel through a single, independent marketplace, we’re reinventing a better future for our industry.