Exclusive first look: Navitaire unveils next-gen Stratos solution

Offer-and-order management solution for LCC and hybrid carriers

Last month, at its annual partner conference, Navitaire, debuted first looks for its airline customers of its next-generation solution, Stratos. 

Travolution was able to get exclusive access to the behind-the-scenes demos of this new solution in action to check out its functionality. 

(Pictured: a customer order made using Stratos)

Stratos, being the next-generation follow on from Navitaire's current PSS offering - New Skies which was the first ticketless offering - for its low-cost and hybrid carriers will be an Offer-and-Order management system that mirrors what its parent company, Amadeus, has done for its full-service providers with Nevio.

It will be cloud-native and built on one singular open platform that runs throughout Amadeus' offerings meaning other necessary solutions that might be required to meet an airline's needs will be readily available to customers to add.

The two systems will be different so to minimise potential risk Navitaire have built a bridge to plug the gap of business continuity between the two until the eventual goal of every customer moving over to Stratos is realised. 

A website will sit atop Stratos' Offer-and-Order retailing API to scynchronise all information including airline configuration, inventory, fares and schedules and orders once they are created.

The new functionality will allow for things like scheduling changes (pictured below), managed in Sky Schedule for example, a New Skies schedule Manager, reflected live in Stratos.

(Pictured: schedule manager New Skies backend)

(Pictured: amends being made)

(Pictured: changes made now appearing in Stratos on the frontend)

It supports OAthu (Open Authorisation) and Open ID for travellers log ins and once a traveller has made a selection for search, it will push offers that are cached and generated (on New Skies or Stratos), submit events and then offers will be expired and regenerated, unlike how New Skies behaves today.

New capabilities unique to this type of event-based architecture allow for monitoring what markets are popular, being able to isolate such markets and its performance thanks to the way the development team has decoupled the relationship between pricing and construction and orchestration from delivery.

Data work in Stratos will allow for richer customer shopping experiences based on the likes of media descriptions or extra data generated by AI.

Meanwhile, Stratos' cart capability will see new features such as saved for later items from the cart and live updating when in the cart for when a price is longer the same or inventory expires the cart will reflect this.

If a customer doesn't visit the cart for 30 days, Stratos will remember and airline's will be able to choose whether to offer alternatives or push a recommendation for example. 

It also has functionality to add multiple items to the same cart with unlimited adds but this will likely change once the MVP is in production stage.

(Pictured: new ability to add multiple items to cart)

Other new capabilities improve customer sharing of fares with family and friends by using a deep link (URL) which will then display the content exactly as it was originally.

(Pictured: how it would look after it's shared for the recipient, just the same as the sender)

Stratos uses hot cache to keep offers generated to be long lived which will be useful for not just travellers but airlines for its marketing purposes when doing activity with Google ads or Facebook ads.

Selective checkout is available on Stratos and it is non-homogenous so hotels, cars, activities, refundability etc can all be added at the same point, too.

(Pictured: new ability to add ancillaries such as hotel and car hire)