Happy 1st Birthday – Settlement with Orders (SwO)
As we mark the 1st anniversary of the Settlement with Orders (SwO) services’ first usage, one thing is certain. This is a milestone to be proud of and the future potential for SwO is immense.
When Click Travel initially got involved in NDC and afterward the ONEOrder programs, alongside British Airways, the initial benefits for airlines and customers were obvious, better products, superior merchandising, customization the list goes on and on. This wasn’t the only benefit we saw. For Click it was also about the simplification and automation of processes that would be made possible. And Settlement with Orders (SwO) is the perfect example.
For us the existing settlement process was both complex and time consuming, with ticket numbers changing dozens of times throughout the lifecycle of a transaction. Often completely outside our platform with limited to zero correlation back to our original order.
Settlement with Orders has changed all of this for Click.
The Single ONEOrder reference ties every single transaction seamlessly back to our original order for instant and automated reconciliation. Every single commitment is confirmed back to us via the SwO API where we can allocate or accrue those commitments as well as produce detailed live analysis and visualization of upcoming settlements.
In the hour of need
There have been many negatives during the COVID crisis, but SwO has made our ability to process changes and refunds seamless, customers are able to cancel online travel via our direct NDC connection which is then automatically processed and allocated without any human intervention.
In fact, since moving to SwO our entire settlement process has not required any manual intervention. Every single commitment was matched 100% to our platform. That has meant what was previously hours or even days of cross-checking, is now achieved in minutes.
A bright future and easy implementation
The prospect of wider rollout need not be a daunting one. Whilst we announced that Click Travel and British Airways were picked to trial the brand new settlement system back in September 2019, once the discussions were out of the way it only required a few weeks of actual development work for the team of engineers to implement the necessary changes. That timeline will only get shorter.
Our hope is that the adoption of SwO will now increase and we are looking forward to more of our NDC partner airlines implementing SwO so that we can all benefit from the increased automation and reduced costs the program brings.
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