Just more than one year after its acquisition of
Routehappy, ATPCO says it has finished integrating that company’s rich content
into its system, facilitating the development of products to lead “airlines,
systems and channels into the next generation of retailing.”
Following the February 2018 acquisition, Routehappy operated
as a wholly owned subsidiary of ATPCO, led by its CEO, Robert Albert. With the
integration complete, Albert is now ATPCO’s executive vice president of
retailing, reporting to ATPCO CEO Rolf Purzer.
Routehappy sales head Jonathan
Savitch becomes chief commercial officer for ATPCO, and Routehappy product head
Jaivin Anzalota becomes ATPCO’s chief product officer.
“When we did the acquisition, we tried to let Routehappy operate within their silo, in the same corporate structure that had existed before,”
Purzer says.
“We very soon realized there’s a lot of more synergies we
can create if we bring the two product teams together into one team. So the Routehappy
rich content team and the ATPCO ancillary team both are together and developing
the ATPCO by Routehappy retailing solution.”
The new Retailing Solutions product line brings together
ATPCO’s Optional Services and Branded Fares with Routehappy’s Amenities Hub,
UTA (Universal Ticket Attribute) Hub, and UPA (Universal Product Attribute Hub.
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Savitch says ATPCO’s work managing more than 200 million
fares for 460 airlines and its partnerships with carriers, agencies, search
engines, global distribution systems and governments worldwide is providing “more
content, a lot more breadth, a lot more systems plugging in, so it’s quite a
big expansion of the overall capabilities in that way.”
The retailing products are intended to help airlines create,
manage and distribute differentiated products through all channels using
dynamic pricing, branded fares, rich content, NDC and other distribution
capabilities. ATPCO’s Next Generation Storefront solution, which provides a
more detailed way to display flights, will be incorporated into Retailing
Solutions once it is finalized.
Looking ahead, Purzer says the full integration of
Routehappy into ATPCO positions the company for the future, not just with the regard
to rich content but also by creating a new structure to drive innovation.
“As an organization we had to change as well and expand our
capability from being basically a very reliable, very accurate intermediary for
content distribution … to move into the direction to be a co-innovator within the
industry and a company that can be described as a data and technology company,”
Purzer says.
“To do that it was not just a product play; it was an organizational
structure and culture play. We wanted intentionally to get in talent, to get in
culture that is much more agile than ATPCO’s culture and to rejuvenate with new
genes ATPCO as a company. That is really happening.”