Digital Commerce Platform

Digital Commerce Platform

Overview Datalex is a market leader in digital commerce for travel retailers. Our Commerce Platform enables a travel marketplace of over one billion shoppers covering every corner of the globe, driven by some of the world s most innovative airline retail brands. The Datalex digital commerce platform is a scalable, flexible, component-based commerce platform built on modular n-tier architecture to deliver unparalleled flexibility to the airline retailer. The Datalex digital commerce platform enables tailored, relevant and optimized retailing of products, prices, promotions and rewards to individual travelers across any channel/device. The digital commerce platform architecture is designed and proven to support business-critical functions in a high-volume transaction environment where 24/7/365 availability is crucial to success. The Datalex digital commerce platform is a component-based retail infrastructure. Omni Channel Framework Our unified commerce components are delivered as B2C and B2B applications and as an intelligent API platform ensuring your customers can interact with you in a consistent manner on whichever sales channel/device they choose. Applications are designed to support multi-channel capability to distribute your products into every sales channel. Pricing and Product Management Pricing and Product Management components are used to configure standalone or bundled pricing, and sales content of airline fares & rules; a limitless ancillary/optional products and services (bags, seats, lounge, in-flight meals and many more) and an extensive array of nonair ancillary offerings (car hire, flights, hotels, travel insurance, ground transportation, tours & attractions and many more). Offer Management Sophisticated merchandizing and personaliza- tion features allow the airline retailer to promote, bundle, package, reward and tailor a multitude of travel products across all channels and touchpoints. Order Management A central hub for pre-trip, during-trip and posttrip operations. Give your customers flexible, omni-channel fulfilment and trip management options while effectively managing the interaction across all channels and throughout the customer journey. Connect Layer The Datalex Commerce Platform is an extensive service-oriented architecture to work with your existing PSS (passenger service systems); enterprise systems, payment and fraud processors and any third party host supplier system. Omni Channel Datalex delivers robust technology to merchandise travel products across all devices and touchpoints across multiple sales channels. Choose from a full feature set of highly customizable point of sale applications for B2C and B2B channels delivered for PC, web, and mobile apps with the ability to configure and design user flows to meet the airline s requirements. Alternatively, leverage an intelligent API platform and robust development tools set of REST web services for pricing, offer and order management to support custom application development. A Self-Service application enables the airline to set configuration parameters and business rules specific to that channel, market or touchpoint without the need for programming. A point of sale hierarchy is supported to avoid duplication of configuration work. The Datalex digital commerce platform supports multiple sales channels and multiple consumer touchpoints through its point of sale configuration. A separate point of sale can be set up for each sales channel (e.g. corporate/licensee country websites, partner websites, corporate Copyright 2015 Datalex (Ireland) Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.datalex.com 2

clients, etc.). Similarly, additional points of sale can be set up for various consumer touchpoints such as web, call center, kiosk, mobile, etc. Each point of sale can contain its own set of configuration parameters and business rules specific to that channel. Business rules enable the airline to leverage the modular platform components for pricing, offer management and order management. Each point of sale in the Datalex digital commerce platform fully supports multiple languages and currencies. B2C Applications for PC, web and mobile provide for rich shopping, booking and trip management experience tightly coupled to the unified commerce features of pricing, offer management and order management. A Travel Agency application allows airline agency partners to shop and book directly with the airline using NDC compliant pricing, shopping and order management services. The Corporate Travel application for corporate partners eliminates the need and cost of using a third-party agency to provide travel booking and management services for corporate employees. Partners can shop, reserve, ticket, manage reservations, and report on sales in a directly connected, secure environment. The agency or travel arranger can leverage the same features available in the B2C applications, e.g. fare families and a-la-carte products and services, as well as negotiated fare pricing and availability. Datalex is an active participant in the IATA NDC Working Group, working with airlines and technology providers to accelerate new industry standards in distribution. Call Center Application The Configurability and usability of the application coupled with extensive offer management and order management features to support all fares, bundles and optional services ensure a superior customer service. Features include configurable rules for change, cancel and refund of all products (air and ancillary); redemption booking and the ability to waive charges. Efficient customer profile management ensures faster processing and relevant cross-sell of optional products and services. API Platform An open API platform architecture which supports comprehensive REST web services for all pricing, merchandising, personalization and order management features. Developer portal, UI SDKs and configuration tools allow your internal IT or accredited Agility Partner Providers to leverage an open, extensible and scalable Commerce Platform with agile SDK developer tools, service delivery, support and training. All schema support current and evolving IATA NDC standards. Pricing The Air Pricing and Availability components provide high performance availability and interline shopping and pricing across multiple carriers. A scalable and robust pricing system, it processes millions of price availability queries every hour for global travel retailers in support of advanced shopping, bundling, refunds and trip management commerce features. In production with multi-airline CRS/PSS and revenue management systems, The air pricing and availability component is integrated with Sabre, Amadeus, SITA, TravelSky, HP Shares, and proprietary CRS solutions. The pricing system supports one-way, round-trip, circle-trip, open-jaw, single/multiple carrier itineraries, codeshare partners, interline partners, and Cat 25/private tariffs/public tariffs/add-ons. As an integrated core component of the Datalex Commerce Platform, Pricing and Product Copyright 2015 Datalex (Ireland) Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.datalex.com 3

Management components work seamlessly to configure accurate pricing, availability and sales content for fares, limitless ancillary/optional products and services (bags, seats, lounge, inflight meals and many more), and an extensive array of non-air ancillary offerings (car hire, flights, hotels, travel insurance, ground transportation, tours & attractions and many more). Designed for scalability and flexibility, the component provides support for multiple fare sources (including ATPCO, SITA and custom fare sources). All required data for fares, rules, schedules, exchange rates, and taxes are supported. N-tier architecture allows the system to scale up linearly by adding additional server instances. The Product Management component features a product catalog which enables the configuration limitless product content and pricing availability from the domains of air optional/ ancillary services, hotel, car, insurance, ground transportation, activities and tours, and airport parking. As an integrated component of the commerce platform, the airline can consolidate ancillary pricing with air pricing for bundled offerings, e.g. fare families. The airline can also manage payment and financial accounting for airline-delivered ancillaries with support for IATA EMD standards or other airline standards. Define and describe any ancillary item; describe how it is to be offered (passenger-segment); manage media (pictures); manage remarks to send to a host; and manage cancellation policies. Control inventory and availability by market, channel, touchpoint, and traveler persona. Price: Decide if the item is to be displayed for sale for a particular passenger. Price the item in accordance with merchandizing business rules, e.g. fare family and persona. Offer Management The Offer Management component features an extensive Business Rules Engine (BRE) frame- work and tool set to dynamically extend and modify core the digital commerce platform functionality in order to satisfy changing business requirements without the need to write and deploy new program code. The added functionality is implemented in the form of business rules, which are managed via the configuration tools. Merchandising Datalex defines merchandising as a retail practice for optimized sale and promotion of offerings. Sophisticated merchandising and personalization functionality to shop, promote, bundle, package, reward and tailor a multitude of travel products across the all channels and touchpoints. Merchandising Services are further enhanced through dynamic pricing, product management and persona components to dynamically price and tailor the offering according to market, channel, and touchpoint and persona group. The Persona component enables advanced segmentation and optimization of offers, promotions and rewards tailored to the needs of the traveler at each point in the travel experience. Persona uses multiple data sources including intelligence obtained during the shopping process to dynamically establish a set of persona characteristics that define the customer s needs and market segment. This feature makes real-time predictions of implicit interest and customer value to optimize what is offered and at what price, with categorization of product, pricing and promotions based on the customer s persona. Persona Calculation uses business rules to characterize the customer s needs. Some of the input data includes profile information, search criteria, contents of the existing shopping cart and other external information like web session information. Once the Datalex digital commerce platform has determined the persona Copyright 2015 Datalex (Ireland) Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.datalex.com 4

characteristics, we examine and optimize product priced options most likely to convert. The Promotions component provides the capability for business users to dynamically configure and deploy promotions and offers during the shopping process. It is a flexible framework providing an airline with an easy -to-use and robust set of features to quickly publish a wide variety of promotion types that are available to all potential customers, to a targeted and limited sub-set of customers and even an individual customer. Promotions functionality enables the efficient creation of a variety of promotion types, when coupled with marketing strategies; it can drive demand and increase conversion rates. The Loyalty Redemption component provides the capability to shop and pay for products and services using only frequent flyer miles or a combination of redeemed frequent flyer miles and money. The airline has the ability to create flexible rules that define redemption ratios for air fares stored in monetary units. The redemption ratio rules include rounding rules. When using the miles and money option, the system can present the user a miles and money slider control where the user can interactively see various miles and money combinations. Various payment settlement methods are supported A customer profile engine is exposed as a set of web services with seamless support for all external customer profile systems also. The Datalex Commerce Platform is integrated with a wide variety of airline loyalty systems. Search Server gives the airline ultimate control to serve needs of metasearch and media partners, presenting the capability to target specific deals to this increasingly relevant channel while significantly reducing the cost of host transactions. Fares, taxes, schedules and seat availability are updated in real time using this intelligent cache which ensures accurate price/availability. The Search Server stores information such as lowest price per day, route, POS, carrier, passenger type or currency. The airline can configure search parameters within a flexible query engine which supports all fare types and fare bundles. Results are exposed in a JSON API which allows flexible and reliable search queries. This data can then be retrieved to support metasearch partners and to target and advertise offers. Order Management Fundamental to the Datalex Commerce Platform is the Order Management component. This is the customer hub for all pre-trip, during-trip and post-trip operations and a record of all offers and purchases at all touchpoints. Unlike legacy single domain systems, the reservation structure was designed as a retail system for travel. Products from all travel domains are stored and managed in a common consistent way with the ability to link each product reservation dynamically to multiple host systems. A common set of reservation web services supports agile shopping, booking and payment features as well as extensive payment handling and trip management features. The Reservation Management Database is a fully relational Oracle database that supports a single customer view for all airline channels. The database can be used to maintain reservations created by the digital commerce platform and/or reservations imported from non-datalex systems such as a GDS host or other sources. Real-time synchronization between the digital commerce platform reservations and other systems is supported to ensure that updates made externally to the digital commerce platform are updated to the Datalex reservation. The database supports complete traveler/customer data and complete itinerary data from shopping basket to reservation of record and super PNR. All travel components and customer, traveler, Copyright 2015 Datalex (Ireland) Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.datalex.com 5

Datalex Connect is the integration layer for access to the airline CRS and enterprise systems as well as external supplier systems across multiple travel domains. A common methodology and services layer is routed via a servant to one or more configured adaptors. Each API converts the message to the correct host request, reagency, payment, documentation, and itinerary information are stored in the database. This data is the foundation for: Sales history Reservation modification management Trip purchases Life to date purchases Management reporting The database provides data structures to maintain components from all travel domains air, car, hotel, air ancillaries, insurance, activities, tours, ground transportation, etc. It also supports business-critical functions in a high-volume transaction environment where 24/7 availability is crucial to success. The Trip Management component provides extensive Manage Booking capability as a valuable self-service to travelers, reducing the cost of servicing and providing an opportunity to re-target tailored offerings. Trip Management features: Ticket revalidate, exchange, reissue and refund Change dates, modify route or cancel itinerary Change selected members of a party or partially flown itineraries Add legs and ancillary items Upgrade/downgrade cabin Pre-purchase bag fees, seat selection, upgrade Cross-sell limitless ancillary offers such as lounge passes, Wi-Fi, or any item defined in the product catalog Trip management also supports a consistent trip management service for reservations made on external third party systems, e.g. car, hotel, and insurance offers can also be presented. Irregular operations (IROPS) support ДД View, accept or reject re-accommodation ДД on alternative flights due to IROPS Dynamically waive change fees or ДД implement add-collect fees for more expensive flight options Inform traveler of schedule change and prompt to accept, process ticket exchange or generate contact with call center The Payments component enables multiple forms of payment to complete bookings across all travel product and service domains. As well as standard airline payment processes a payments hub provides support for all major credit payment providers as well as an extensive local and global coverage for alternative debit and micropay services. In addition, the payments component supports payment pass through to partner merchants. The Payments Component supports payment by combination of loyalty currency (miles/rewards) and money. The Credit Bank component is a comprehensive credit management facility which enables business partners to manage credit and track revenue and payments. Connect The Connect Integration framework supports connectivity to the airline PSS and enterprise systems, as well as all major travel product supplier systems across multiple travel domains. Orchestration services ensure seamless interoperability of systems to provide a consistent and unified retail experience. Datalex is proven and in production across all major PSS and major enterprise system (loyalty, payments, revenue management, CRM) providers worldwide. Copyright 2015 Datalex (Ireland) Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.datalex.com 6

ceives the response and, using the common interface, and returns the response to the servant where, if necessary, it is consolidated with responses from other configured adaptors before being returned to the user. Datalex Connect supports all Datalex digital commerce platform pricing, offer management and order management services against certified host supplier systems. Datalex Digital Commerce Platform Architecture The Datalex digital commerce platform is implemented using a Service Oriented Architecture comprising a wide range of loosely coupled modular services. This approach has enabled the platform to be successfully leveraged by a broad range of airlines across various sales channels and touchpoints. An intelligent API platform facilitates: The rapid implementation of highly configurable and flexible user interfaces. Openness and flexibility to interoperate with other enterprise solutions regardless of technology or platform. This ensures that interoperability with other systems is easy to achieve into the future. Lower-level atomic services map directly to common functions across each travel domain, while higher-level composite services enable higher-level business functions, removing complexity from the client applications using these services. Scalability and performance: Scale to meet the requirements of large production environments Usability: Highly configurable allowing maximum reuse of business components and services. Maintainability: Allow business components and services to be easily extended to meet new business requirements. Portability: optimized for the travel industry, compliant with and driving industry standards. Copyright 2015 Datalex (Ireland) Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.datalex.com 7