Airline Technology & Navitaire Integration

ME-Tech is not an official Navitaire implementation partner. What we are is a technology team that has spent 15 years building systems for airlines that run on Navitaire New Skies. That distinction matters: our knowledge was earned in production environments alongside airline operations teams, not in certification programmes. Our engineers understand the PNR data model at field granularity — how itineraries are constructed and amended, how fare rules attach to segments, how ancillary SSRs (Special Service Requests) price and fulfil, how the departure control sequence tracks through check-in and boarding events. This is the knowledge that comes from debugging real issues in live airline systems, under time pressure, with passengers at the airport.

We have worked across the full evolution of the Navitaire interface stack: the ASP.NET/XSLT Skysales booking engine (including white-label customisation and platform upgrades), the SOAP/XML APIs that many early integrations still depend on, and the modern REST-based Digital API with OAuth authentication that is the standard for new development today. When Navitaire releases a new API version, the downstream impact on every integrated system is something we have learned to anticipate — from having managed these version transitions repeatedly across our airline client engagements over more than a decade.

Our delivery track record includes booking engines, airport kiosk systems, web check-in, loyalty integrations, crew applications, and back-office finance tools — all built against Navitaire as the system of record. Airlines evaluating large global SIs pay for substantial overhead and generalised enterprise skills. With ME-Tech, they get a lean team with specific, practitioner-level experience in the Navitaire ecosystem and a cost structure that reflects our APAC operating base — typically a fraction of what global SIs bill for equivalent scope.

Navitaire's Digital API provides the primitives for booking — availability, pricing, PNR creation, payment, ancillary attachment — but converting those primitives into a conversion-optimised booking experience is engineering work that Navitaire does not do for you. We build Internet Booking Engines (IBEs) on top of Digital API that handle the full purchase journey: city-pair search and calendar availability, fare family selection, seat map with real-time inventory, ancillary upsell sequences, multi-currency payment, and booking confirmation with itinerary delivery.

For airlines running legacy Navitaire Skysales, we handle platform customisation, visual redesigns within the Skysales template engine, and full migrations to Digital API-based custom IBEs when the airline is ready to move off the platform-provided frontend. We also integrate distribution through Amadeus and other GDS channels, ensuring fare and availability parity between direct and indirect channels.

Package booking — flight plus hotel, tours, or transfer ancillaries — requires aggregating inventory from multiple sources into a single shopping and checkout experience. We have built packaging engines that combine New Skies flight inventory with third-party hotel APIs (Hotelbeds, Expedia Partner Solutions) and tour operator feeds, presenting a unified bundle with correct combined pricing, availability constraints, and fulfilment paths for each component. For airlines, packages are a meaningful ancillary revenue stream; the booking engine needs to make them as easy to purchase as a standalone flight.

Group and charter bookings add further complexity: PNR block creation in New Skies, name collection workflows, deposit and balance payment schedules, and seat assignment across a block. We have built group booking management portals for both airline reservations teams and travel agents — reducing the manual coordination overhead that group bookings typically require.

Airport technology has operational characteristics that web development does not: hardware you cannot update silently, processes that must complete in under ten seconds, and users who are stressed passengers or overloaded ground staff with no patience for application errors. We have built airport systems in these conditions, and we understand the engineering discipline they require.

Our check-in kiosk implementations connect directly to Navitaire's DCS functionality via the Digital API or legacy XML interfaces: reading PNR records, verifying identity documents (CCIS/API checks), presenting seat maps, issuing boarding passes to direct thermal printers or mobile wallet, tagging bags, and posting check-in events back to the departure record in real time. We have implemented both CUSS-compatible kiosk applications (for shared airport-owned hardware) and proprietary kiosk software running on airline-owned self-service infrastructure.

Web check-in is a DCS workflow delivered through the browser: the same check-in logic, identity verification, seat assignment, and boarding pass delivery — but on the passenger's own device. We build web check-in that handles the edge cases airlines encounter at scale: checked-in passengers who try to change seats, passengers with ancillary services already attached, travel document re-verification requirements, and the graceful handling of check-in window open/close rules enforced by New Skies.

Gate management systems give gate agents a real-time picture of the flight manifest — who is checked in, who has boarded, who is expected but not yet through security, upgrade eligibility, unaccompanied minors, and IROPS re-accommodation status. We build gate tools that surface the right information for each workflow without overwhelming agents during the boarding window.

Airline loyalty programmes span multiple systems: New Skies records the flight; a separate loyalty platform (ICLP, Comarch, custom, or the airline's own system) calculates and credits miles; partner integrations extend earning to hotels, banks, car rental, and retail. Each boundary requires real-time or near-real-time data exchange, deduplication, and failure handling.

We build the integration layers that connect these systems: earn triggers fired from New Skies booking and flight completion events, delivered to loyalty APIs with the correct flight data and fare basis codes; redemption booking flows where award pricing is calculated by the loyalty platform and fed back into a New Skies booking as a zero-revenue award ticket; tier status display within IBE and mobile booking flows so passengers can see their standing and close-to-upgrade status at the moment of purchase.

Partner earn/burn integrations — particularly with banks and credit card programmes — require a controlled interface that lets partners verify flight records and submit mileage transactions without exposing the PSS directly. We have built partner API gateways that handle PNR verification, eligibility checking, and mileage posting with full audit logging, enabling airlines to expand their loyalty ecosystem to financial partners without the security risks of direct PSS access.

Technical crew generate significant paper documentation: journey logs (voyage reports) recording flight times, fuel uplifts, and sector details; defect entries against aircraft components cross-referenced to MEL (Minimum Equipment List) categories; engine and airframe limit tracking; NOTAM and ATIS records. We build mobile and web applications that replace these paper workflows with structured, searchable, auditable digital records.

Our technical crew systems integrate with maintenance tracking platforms (TRAX, AMOS, or custom MRO systems) for defect-to-maintenance-order workflows, and surface relevant technical documentation (AMM references, airworthiness directives, service bulletins) directly in the context where a technician needs them — rather than requiring a separate document management lookup. For airlines pursuing paperless flight operations, we have designed the data architecture that makes this compliant with aviation regulatory requirements.

Cabin crew applications handle service and safety checklists, passenger special needs management (PRMs, unaccompanied minors, medical cases), galley inventory records, and post-flight service reports. These applications must function reliably without internet connectivity — aircraft cabins have unpredictable connectivity — and synchronise reliably when connectivity is restored. We build offline-first architecture as a fundamental design requirement, not as an afterthought added when connectivity problems appear in testing.

Airline refund processing is operationally painful because the calculation is complex: fare rules determine refundability, tax refundability varies by jurisdiction, service fees may apply, and the sequence of payment processor reversal vs. PNR record update must be correct to avoid accounting discrepancies. We have built automated refund processing systems that call the New Skies refund API with the correct parameters, generate settlement records, and trigger payment gateway reversals — reducing what was a manual, error-prone agent workflow to an automated process that handles standard cases and flags exceptions for human review.

BSP reconciliation and GDS commission management require matching booking records against BSP reporting files, identifying discrepancies, calculating agent commissions, and producing the audit trail that finance teams and external auditors require. We have built reconciliation tooling that automates this matching process and generates exception reports for the discrepancies that require manual investigation.

For intranet systems, we build technical document management platforms — versioned document storage with approval workflows, aircraft type and registration filtering, and controlled distribution to maintenance crew — and customer service issue tracking systems that give airline service teams a structured view of customer complaints, change requests, and compensation cases, with PNR lookup integrated so agents always have the booking context for the case they are handling.

The extranet problem — giving external partners access to live flight data without exposing the PSS — is one we have solved repeatedly. Bus and coach operators connecting passengers to regional airports need to verify that a passenger's flight departed or is operating before boarding a connecting service. Banks and fintech companies need to verify travel records for insurance claims and travel credit card benefits. Each use case requires a scoped, authenticated API that exposes exactly the data the partner needs and nothing more, with full audit logging of every query. We design and operate these partner APIs as first-class products, not afterthoughts.