Welcome to NDC Butler!

Welcome to BookingBuilder NDC Butler™!  

It is active now for both Amadeus and Sabre.

If you're ready to get started:

System Administrator instructions are here

and Agent instructions are here

Introduction

BookingBuilder NDC Butler™ consists of several components that work seamlessly together.  Just like a butler who appears when you need help, and makes everything seem simple, NDC Butler™ is always waiting for you.  When activated, NDC Butler™ takes care of the tedious work, making it seem simple and easy.

This guide is intended primarily for agency employees who have a technical understanding of supporting BookingBuilder products.  A streamlined user guide for agents who use NDC Butler will be coming soon.

Some of the components of NDC Butler™ are:

• For Sabre customers, we updated our Sabre Red App.  Details on how to ensure you have the correct version are found under Troubleshooting.
• There are several updated components of BookingBuilder Desktop™ and BookingBuilder Genie™ that allow NDC Butler™ to perform its magic.
• A new group of prompts,  NDC Butler™ Prompts (15720), has been shared with you.  These contain required components of NDC Butler™, including saving and remembering availability requests, displaying messages, and interpreting commands and sending the request information to the components that navigate the GDS and fill in the forms.
• Several new prompts that have been copied to your group that is using NDC Butler™.  These are described below.

Requirements

• To use NDC Butler™ with Amadeus, BookingBuilder Build 438 or newer is required.
• To use NDC Butler™ with Sabre, BookingBuilder Build 437 or newer is required.

In addition, certain prompts must be shared to your group, and a few prompts copied into your group.

Using Butler

• Butler remembers the last availability, so agents can type ‘NDC’ as a Sabre command at any time.  Butler now supports many options with the NDC command.  Type ‘NDC HELP’ as a Sabre command to see the options.  There are some videos at https://bookingbuilder.com/products/ndc-butler/ that show the functionality.  What you see in the Amadeus videos also applies to Sabre; the Sabre videos will be posted soon.

• There is also an option to offer NDC at each availability.  To enable this, enable the "Trigger NDC From Availability" prompt in your group. By default this triggers for any availability response.  It’s important to have this trigger at a response and not a command, NDC Butler may send its own commands and things don’t work well if this prompt triggers at a command and then NDC Butler™ sends a command before the first response comes in.  Feel free to add conditions to this, such as only prompt when a certain airline appears in the availability.  You can create your own prompts to activate NDC Butler as well. They need an action of “Fire Actions From Named Prompt” with a prompt name of “NDC Butler Shop Script”.

• The NDC Butler Availability Box is brand new, and it can be really helpful for those who want to stay in graphical.  We'd love your feedback.  We're thinking it could be triggered from a hotkey - something like CTRL-SHIFT-N for NDC and the box pops up, making it far faster and easier than filling out the whole graphical form.  Right now the only way to trigger the box is to open the BB Configuration dialog, click Prompts, select NDC Butler Availability Box and click Fire Actions.  We'd love to hear your thoughts.  To see this in action, open https://bookingbuilder.com/products/ndc-butler/ and look at the Availability Box videos.

If you click the prompt or type ‘NDC’, Butler will check its settings to see if a profile is required.  If so, it will check to see if there are names present.  If not, it will prompt you to display a PNR or copy a profile.  It will then navigate your GDS to the air shopping screen and will fill in all the fields. The options to check for a profile and read other data are discussed in Configuration.

Please let us know if there is additional information you like added to the graphical Shop form.  We'll work with you to get those in there.

Configuration

In your group there is a prompt called, “Set NDC Butler Genie Options”.  It fires at Prompts Loaded, and contains one action of “Read Data From Variables”.  You can enable or disable the profile requirement, set the command to display the Corporate ID information, and set the expression to read the Corporate ID information from the response.  These options are GDS-specific.  Please note that by default this prompt is disabled, so a profile will not be required and no ID information will be displayed or read.

* Bonus *

We're barely through testing here, but we've enabled Sabre NDC fares in Instant Fare Quote for you to try.  You'll see it as "Sabre NDC", and the search results will show if the fare is ndc - you'll see (ndc) - or not.  You can limit it to only ndc.  This way you can see NDC and regular fares side by side.  IFQ is getting these right through your Sabre connection.  We haven't even shown this to anyone outside BookingBuilder yet.  We're really looking forward to your feedback.

Troubleshooting

If Butler doesn't work on Sabre the first step is to ensure you have the proper version of our Sabre Red App.  In Sabre Red 360, click Help then click Workstation Technical Information.  There is a screenshot below where you can see ‘com.bookingbuilder.lmredapp’ and the version.  Scroll through your display to make sure you have the version shown in the screenprint below:

Please do not hesitate to contact us at [e-mail] should you need any support related to BookingBuilder Butler. We, along with your new Butler, are here to serve you.;)   Thank you so much!