Airline Baggage Functionality
The OpenTravel air merchandising & operations project team created a new baggage message pair that support baggage pricing, baggage allowance, baggage list and baggage catalog with pricing functionality.
Enhanced Airline Merchandising Functionality
The ability to exchange air
merchandising offers has been added to air booking path, seat management
and flight details messages. The new AirOfferChoiceType element allows
the exchange of three categories of air merchandising offers within
these messages, including summary, priced and customer purchased.
Enhanced Hotel Functionality
Property-level definition and exchange of environmental impact and green programs & initiatives has been added to the hotel schema, including carbon foot print information, water usage information, energy and power usage information, recycling information and environmental program information.
Golf Rates Functionality
The OpenTravel golf project team created one new message pair for querying for tee time rates based on multiple sets of rate criteria, including course name, date range, applied discounts & promotions, golfer qualifiers and specific rate plan categories.
Enhanced Ground Transportation Functionality
Additional information was added to the ground schema for pickup, interim stop and dropoff locations, including geocoding, specific location types (such as Company, Hotel and Point of Interest, special instructions and formatted directions. Support for shuttle service was added, including multiple stop specification, owner & operator information, operation schedules, and ticketing & reservation information.
Multi-Modal Targeted Offer Functionality
A key emerging opportunity for travel industry suppliers is to provide targeted offers for traveler’s based on some quantity of known or derived trip and traveler characteristics. With the inclusion of the new MultiModalOfferType in OpenTravel schema, implementers can immediately exchange key information from a booking response in a subsequent availability request for targeted cross sell offers. For example, an airline supplier that has just confirmed a flight arrangement for one of their customers can send an availability request to a car supplier that contains pertinent information that allows the car supplier to return car rental offers that are complementary to the customers’ existing flight and trip information. OpenTravel air, cruise, golf, ground, hotel, package tour, tour & activity, rail and vehicle rental request availability messages have been enhanced with a MultimodalOffer element that contains the targeted offer influencers. Read the 2012A Release Notes for a use case between an airline and a car rental supplier.
Secure Information Exchange Functionality
Support for encrypted payment and account information has been added to the specification to allow implementers to comply with PCI regulations and privacy legislation. Secure data mechanisms include payment instrument tokenization; support for 3-D secure protocol for online credit and debit card transactions (for programs such as Verified by Visa); and support for privacy protection via field level encryption for certain combinations of elements and attributes.
General Schema Maintenance
In an effort to reduce XML schema binding issues, general maintenance was performed on the 2012A schema. General maintenance functionality includes namespaced common files; removal of nested attribute groups; and xs:NMTOKEN type retyped as xs:string.
Additional Extension points have been added to OpenTravel schema, including TPA_Extensions at the complexType level and open enumerated lists that allow implementers to select a predefined item from the list or exchange a proprietary value with their trading partners. Open Lists also support other standards bodies, such as IATA and ISO, by providing an XML structure that accommodates defining and exchanging their code list and code list value information.
The full Readme file is available here.