After an intense period of integration and careful testing, Senegal Airlines is now providing its content to Travelfusion participants worldwide. Travelfusion, the leader in direct connect solutions and providing cost efficient distribution alternatives is further expanding its worldwide presence and now also spearheading distribution development in Africa. Senegal Airlines has chosen to partner with Travelfusion, the leader in direct connect solutions to pioneer alternative distribution method in the African market.

“We have chosen Travelfusion to implement our distribution strategy in West Africa and to help ‘enrich’ the distribution landscape, dominated by GDSs with modern Direct Connect technology. We believe that a more balanced distribution mix will benefit suppliers, travel agents and in the end travellers in Africa. Opening our content via Travelfusion is only a first step towards modernising the West-African distribution landscape”, explains Andy Günthard, CIO & Head of Distribution at Dakar based Senegal Airlines.

Senegal Airlines is the result of an innovative partnership between the Senegalese State and the national private sector. Technical and strategic partnerships were sealed with Airbus, first European aircraft manufacturer, for his fleet and with Emirates, renowned for its skills and efficiency in the air transport, for its operational implementation.

Senegal Airlines began its activities in January, 2011 with 2 planes Airbus A320, before enriching gradually its fleet which counts 4 devices today: 3 Airbuses A320 and an ATR 72-200.

Based in Dakar, Senegal Airlines proposes henceforth scheduled flights towards Abidjan, Bamako, Banjul, Bissau, Cap-Skirring, Conakry, Cotonou, Dakar, Douala, Libreville, Niamey, Ouagadougou, Praia and Ziguinchor. The Dakar’s hub allows the correspondence between each of the served cities, as well as towards Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit www.senegalairlines.aero.

Travelfusion is the largest Direct Connect booking engine for 160+ airlines and rail operators. Travelfusion powers the largest leisure and corporate online travel agencies and tour operators around the world that use our content in their flights and dynamic packages applications. We also provide comprehensive post booking support and state of the art reporting tools for a complete end to end management of the booking operations.

We are excited to announce the release of our new Hotel API – it is fast, it is intelligent and has full booking support. All packaged in one API and currently available for our customers – business and leisure.

Reducing a long list of results that are impossible to navigate to a more manageable list of the exactly right options for the user. Our solution considers multiple features (location, price, etc) and assesses their value based on specific user request.

It’s also lighter and therefore faster than ever before. We are now able to reduce a long list of results that are impossible to navigate, to a more manageable list of the exactly right options for the user. We factor in multiple features like location, price etc, and we assess their value based on request from the user. We only return the most relevant result for you – a powerful feature for websites but specifically when you develop for mobile devices.

Combine this with full location support – geo-coordinates data for every hotel and the ability to search by that – and you have the perfect solution for tablets and mobile phones.

We also threw in full hotel details and pictures which can be retrieved dynamically – and of course full booking support, including our prepay solution.

Photo credit: Noël Zia Lee

“Air Extras” refers to the supplementary costs charged by airlines for services or items such as airport check in and extra baggage. Other types of potential Air Extras include charges for premium boarding on some low cost carriers, meal type and credit card charges. Travelfusion’s API technology now provides the cost of these air-extras in the form of a single API command.  Benefits to Travelfusion’s clients using this new technology are numerous, but perhaps most interesting is the upsell potential.  Clients can quote the cost of ancillary services at any point during the booking process, including at the time of search, thus increasing the probability of users purchasing these extras.

Plans are also in the works to soon incorporate this technology on Travelfusion’s own website to allow customers the ability to quickly and easily calculate the “real cost” of their journey, including all extra fees in one simple step.  Watch this space for news about our Complete Cost Calculator!

The addition of these charges to Travelfusion’s already rich and robust Search and Book solution ensures continued success and possibilities for what is the world’s largest distribution system for low cost airline booking.  For any enquiries about our new support for Air Extras or questions about our API, feel free to contact Travelfusion at any time.

Travelfusion has created a new Direct Connect XML API documentation website, including comprehensive guidelines, frequently asked support questions, detailed specifications and a step-by-step description that will ensure clarity for customers.

Photo credit: Travelfusion

Travelfusion has also produced an XML API test tool that allows customers access to an interactive real-time testing environment of the Travelfusion XML commands. The Travelfusion APIs are simple to integrate yet support all the complex functionality available on travel supplier websites. With these newly released tools, developers will find the development process for their own applications using Travelfusion’s technology to be simpler and more efficient.

Moshe Rafiah, Travelfusion’s founder and CEO states, “Through our comprehensive documentation website and new test tool, we continue to improve the resources we provide our customers to make their experience using Travelfusion easier and more comprehensive. These online tools offer a more user-friendly approach and empower our clients with access to new information and technology testing capabilities.”

Both the new documentation website and the XML API test tool are now live and will be available to new customers.

Our documentation clearly states that the ‘SupplierInfoList’ is optional and can appear within the ‘GroupList’ and/or ‘Leg’ blocks.

Whilst most of the results response, to date, has not returned the ‘SupplierInfoList’ , our upcoming release may return these fields in the results response. This is expected to take place next week.

As this is in line with the spec, your applications should not be affected. However, please review and make sure that it does not. Should you wish to test this, we can facilitate this via our mirror environment (mirrorapi.travelfusion.com)