ENGINEERING
AIR DISTRIBUTION
AUTOMATON
PARTNERSHIP
Modernising airline infrastructure
for a multi-billion dollar
global travel enterprise.
A live, revenue-generating platform. Three GDS environments. A simultaneous NDC rollout. No disruption tolerance. This is what the work actually looked like.
1,200+
PNRs built in a single automated run on peak days
3
3+ yrs
Strategic engineering partnership
Zero
Disruption to live revenue during full migration
THE SITUATION
A platform powering billions in travel revenue — with infrastructure that needed to evolve without stopping.
The client was a global, multi-billion dollar travel and hospitality enterprise. Their platform spanning air, hotel, and car reservations across multiple GDS environments — was the operational backbone of a business processing enormous daily transaction volumes. It was live, revenue-generating, and running continuously.
Leadership had identified a set of compounding infrastructure challenges. Ticketing workflows were running on legacy systems that were becoming harder to maintain and increasingly fragile at scale. Airline distribution was shifting — NDC was no longer a pilot, it was becoming the commercial reality, and the platform had no native capability for it. Charter operations required manual PNR construction that consumed agent time at a rate that didn't scale. And beneath all of it, security vulnerabilities and inconsistent CI/CD pipelines were creating risk that the engineering team couldn't systematically address while also delivering product work.
"The problem is not getting NDC content into your booking system. Dozens of aggregators and technology vendors have solved that. The problem is what happens after the booking."
The constraint that made this genuinely difficult: none of it could be done in isolation. Every change had to happen inside a live environment, alongside existing operations, without creating the kind of disruption that costs revenue and trust.
WHAT THE CTO WAS FACING
Five simultaneous problems, one live platform, zero tolerance for downtime.
THE CHALLENGE SET
Legacy ticketing infrastructure across Amadeus, Travelport and Southwest Airlines needed migration without operational disruption. NDC had to be implemented end-to-end while existing EDIFACT channels remained live. Charter PNR construction needed full automation at a volume that manual processes couldn't sustain. Hotel and car rental integrations needed rebuilding into a coherent architecture. And security and DevOps debt needed systematic resolution — not deferred further.
Each of these would be a significant programme in isolation. Addressing all five simultaneously, inside a production environment handling real bookings, required a partner who understood both the distribution layer and the operational layer. Generic IT firms understand infrastructure. Travel technology firms understand GDS. Very few understand both — and fewer still have built the operational systems that sit downstream of distribution.
THE WORK
From legacy dependency to automated, multi-GDS infrastructure — built while the engine was running.
01 — Intelligent Auto-Ticketing Engine
The migration off legacy ticketing infrastructure began with building a new automated engine from the ground up across Amadeus, Travelport, and Southwest Airlines — one designed not just to replicate the old process but to improve it fundamentally.
The engine re-verifies fares before ticketing, catching price changes that would otherwise create financial exposure. It appends correct forms of payment dynamically. It applies tour code and commission logic without manual input. It synchronises booking data with back-office accounting in real time — not via batch files that can fail silently. And it routes any failures into structured recovery queues with full diagnostic context, so agents can resolve exceptions rather than diagnose them from scratch.
Zero
manual intervention required for standard ticketing transactions
Agents redirected from routine processing to genuine exception handling — the work that actually requires judgement.
02 — Readback, Cancellation & Void Automation
In any multi-GDS environment, data integrity between the GDS and the reservations platform is a persistent operational risk. When tickets are issued manually — as they inevitably are for complex or exception bookings — those records need to find their way back into the system accurately and immediately.
Trabacus built automated Readback services that continuously monitor GDS queues for manually-ticketed PNRs and synchronise passenger information, segment details, and fare data back into the reservations platform — then push it downstream to the back-office accounting system. Cancellation and Void services were built across Amadeus, Travelport, and Sabre, handling the full cancellation workflow automatically for standard cases.
Amadeus | Travelport | Sabre | Southwest Airlines | Back office sync | Automated Queues
03 — End-to-End Amadeus NDC Implementation
NDC implementation is frequently sold as a front-end content problem. The reality for technology teams is that it's a back-office infrastructure challenge. Trabacus led the complete Amadeus NDC integration — covering search-to-booking flows for both published and bulk fares, price verification, booking, and full post-booking servicing.
The implementation ran in parallel with existing EDIFACT channels throughout, maintaining full backward compatibility. A standalone auto-ticketing service was built specifically for NDC bookings. A Readback service was developed to sync manually-issued NDC tickets back into the reservations platform, ensuring data consistency regardless of how a ticket was originated. Cancellation, modification, and inquiry APIs were built per the Amadeus NDC specification — not assumed to behave like EDIFACT.
04 — Risk Block PNR Builder: Charter Operations at Scale
Charter operations are operationally intensive by nature. Each booking requires a complete PNR construction — passenger data, itinerary segments, SSRs, baggage, form of payment — across multiple airlines and GDS environments. At the volumes this client operated, doing that manually was creating a bottleneck that threatened scalability on peak days.
Trabacus designed and deployed an automated Risk Block PNR Builder that runs daily, identifies valid charter bookings for configured city pairs and airlines, and constructs complete PNRs across both Amadeus and Sabre — with no manual input for standard cases. Cancellations and modifications are handled automatically. Failures are surfaced via the platform's TAP system with full diagnostic context. A companion Sync service runs at regular intervals to keep PNR data consistent with reservation records.
1,200+
PNRs constructed in a single automated run on peak days
Across both Amadeus and Sabre, covering multiple airlines and city pairs — without agent involvement in standard cases.
05 — Hotel, Car & Unified Integration Architecture
Beyond air, Trabacus delivered end-to-end API integrations for hotel and car rental suppliers — Derbysoft and Galaxy Connect for hotel connectivity, Avis and Hertz for car rentals — rebuilt to feed into the same unified architecture as the air systems. For the first time, air, hotel, and ground transport data moved through a coherent integration layer rather than a patchwork of point connections.
Underpinning all of this: a unified, reusable API framework with standardised validation, logging, and error handling across all services. Swagger/OpenAPI documentation integrated across pipelines. Communication layers redesigned to support both WCF and modern REST APIs simultaneously — enabling API-first evolution without deprecating existing integrations.
Hotel and Car Rental Suppliers integrated : Derbysoft | Galaxy Connect | Avis | Hertz
Technologies : REST & WCF | Swagger / Open API | CI/CD
06 — Security, Observability & DevOps Stabilisation
Security posture and pipeline reliability are the engineering foundations on which everything else depends. Trabacus led remediation of high and medium severity vulnerabilities identified across Air and Hotel modules via Veracode scans — with systematic fixes applied at a platform level that benefited multiple engineering teams simultaneously, not just the modules in scope.
CI/CD pipelines were stabilised with improved NuGet packaging, consistent restore processes, and clean repeatable builds. Observability and telemetry were enhanced to accelerate root-cause analysis and reduce mean time to resolution for production incidents. Role-based access controls and configuration-driven behaviour were implemented to enable scaling across customers and environments without custom engineering per deployment.
THE OUTCOME
A modernised, API-first infrastructure — operating across both NDC and legacy EDIFACT worlds at production scale.
Distribution architecture
Full NDC capability running in parallel with Amadeus, Travelport, Sabre, and Southwest Airlines EDIFACT channels — without duplicating workflows or creating reconciliation gaps.
Distribution architecture
Full NDC capability running in parallel with Amadeus, Travelport, Sabre, and Southwest Airlines EDIFACT channels — without duplicating workflows or creating reconciliation gaps.
Charter Scale
1,200+ PNRs per peak-day run, automated across Amadeus and Sabre. What was a daily bottleneck became a background process.
Readback, Cancellation, and Void services ensuring every transaction — regardless of origin — is consistently reflected across all systems in real time.
Engineering foundation
Security vulnerabilities remediated. CI/CD pipelines stabilised. Unified API framework deployed. The platform became easier to extend, faster to debug, and safer to operate.
Partnership model
What began as a migration project became a 3+ year strategic technology partnership — sustained delivery inside a live, revenue-generating environment.
If you're managing a live travel platform under modernisation pressure — let's talk.
Most conversations start with one question: what are you trying to solve? We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit — and if we are, what the engagement could look like. No proposal required to have that conversation.