Star Alliance is one of the world’s largest aviation alliances, which maintains a centralized hub providing availability for all Star Alliance partners’ and member carriers’ redemption bookings. Since the redemption availability for Non-Hosted, Non-DCS carriers is not seamless in most of the cases, this hub enables the Star Alliance carriers to check seamless availability to partner data. It receives updates from each carrier that keeps the availability data current and ready for consumption by other Star Alliance carriers.

The Sabre hosted carriers who are Star Alliance members must have access to this data and be able to sell host and Other Airlines (OA) segments for any redemption itinerary from all Point of Sale (POS) platforms.

Digital Connect v4.2 enables AirBook web services and bundled sell to work correctly when booking redemption fares for OA carrier belonging to Star Alliance.

This functionality applies to the following paths:

• Redemption (RBE) flow;
• Manage Your Booking – Change Itinerary (MYB: CI) flow;
  • Loyalty Phase 3 (LP3): Exchange

Highlights

Functional Coverage from Digital Connect Downline Systems

1. If the segment is being booked via long-sell, the Availability Status (AVS) for the Revenue Booking Designator (RBD) on the segment being booked is checked.
   • If the RBD is not found, the segment is booked on a request basis (NN) and remains in a PN/UC status at end-transaction until confirmed/denied by the receiving carrier, which is a time-consuming process.
2. To overcome this Star Alliance has built a centralized database called Star Hub, where the availability is checked seamlessly for Redemption Bookings.
3. Digital Connect identifies the redemption bookings and passes the special indicator where downline identifies the type of carrier, and if it is a Star Alliance carrier who has seamless availability on Star Hub database, then it forces sell.
4. Functionality extended to all carriers that are Star Alliance members.

The Redemption Flow (RBE)

1. The Airline obtains search criteria from the Passenger and submits a /products/air/search request, POST operation to get a list of flights matching the search criteria.
   • The Airline UI displays the returned flights to the Passenger on the Flights page.
2. The Airline uses /login POST to log the Passengers in by the provided data authentication, i.e. account ID and password.
3. The Passenger selects one or more flights. The Airline submits the /products/air POST operation to add the flight(s) to the itinerary and store the itinerary in the session.
   • The Airline prompts Passenger for Passenger details: first name/surname/gender, date of birth, phone number, email address etc.
4. The Airline uses /Passengers POST to add Passenger to the itinerary.
5. The Airline can use the /products/cart GET to obtain a list of all products that have been selected by Passengers (list of selected itineraries, ancillaries, seats, discount, price information, bags, carry-on, and embargo information) and a price breakdown for all the selected products.
6. When the Passenger indicates that shopping is complete the Airline obtains available payment options for the current itinerary by calling GET /paymentOptions. The Airline can format the information for display to the Passenger.
7. When the Passenger selects form of payment, completes the payment and decides to purchase, the Airline initiates the purchase and ticketing process by calling /purchase POST. If authorization is successful, the /purchase service creates a PNR, EMD(s), etc.
   • DC sends information to Star Hub if authorization is successful.
8. The Airline returns a /purchase service POST operation response and the confirmation page is displayed.
9. The Airlines submit a /pnr GET request. The UI can format the information for display to the Passenger.