How to get a cheap flight? What are the best cheap flight websites? Travelers are always looking for ways to answer these questions and spend wisely on their journeys. At Ovago, we understand these needs and are committed to offering the most affordable and flexible flight options. We are excited to announce a groundbreaking collaboration with Trip Ninja, marking a transformative shift in the airline industry. This partnership is set to bring significant benefits to our valued customers, ensuring you get the best flight fares and the most convenient travel experiences.
Trip Ninja is a pioneering Canadian travel technology company founded in 2017. It focuses on making one-destination and multi-city flights easier and cheaper by developing innovative flight booking solutions. Their implementation has been recently optimizing our flight booking processes. Among these solutions is Virtual Interlining (VI). This is a revolutionary technology that dramatically expands the range of affordable flight booking options available to Ovago customers.
Are you comfortable navigating airports and managing self-transfers? If so, keep reading to explore the distinct advantages and features that make VI an excellent choice for flexible and independent travelers. If you prefer a more relaxed and measured way of travel, check out our other blog post on the additional benefits of becoming an Ovago customer.
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What Were the Barriers to Flexible Travel?
Before the emergence of VI, there were:
- Limited Travel Options. Seamless complex-itinerary travel required formal agreements between airlines, which were often restricted to specific alliances. This significantly limited the available travel options for passengers.
- Manual Planning and Booking. Travelers had to meticulously plan their multi-leg journeys and manually book separate tickets for each leg, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming.
- Incompatible Reservation Systems. Different airlines’ reservation systems could not seamlessly communicate with each other, leading to potential errors in booking and managing itineraries, and often resulting in travel disruptions.
How Virtual Interlining by Trip Ninja Solves These Issues
- AI-Driven Algorithms and Machine Learning. VI employs advanced machine learning and algorithms to merge flights from multiple airlines into a single itinerary. This process optimizes travel based on timing, availability, and cost, even when the airlines involved do not have formal agreements.
- Unified Booking and Ticketing. VI enables the issuance of a single ticket for itineraries involving multiple airlines, simplifying the booking process.
- Self-Connecting Flights. VI supports self-connecting flights and enables partnerships between full-service carriers and low-cost carriers. This expands networks and establishes new routes, resulting in more travel options and often reduced flight costs.
Refer to the diagram below for an illustrative example of how VI works.
Read our other article on when it’s worth buying low-cost flight tickets and when it’s wise to splurge on higher-quality flights.
What is Virtual Interline Travel and How Does It Work?
VI is a travel booking method that allows travelers to create itineraries by combining flights from airlines or different alliances that don’t have formal agreements. Here’s a 3-step breakdown of how VI works:
- Data Aggregation. A VI platform gathers flight data from various sources, including global distribution systems (GDS), direct airline feeds, and third-party APIs.
- Data Analysis. Advanced AI-empowered algorithms analyze this data to identify optimal flight combinations.
- Itinerary Creation. The VI platform matches flights from different airlines to create seamless itineraries, ensuring layover times are adequate for smooth transfers and issuing a single ticket for the entire journey.
Check out the two images below for a clear illustration of the potential money savings you can achieve using our VI flight options.
Travelers dreaming of multi-city adventures with Ovago can save significantly by choosing the VI flight option:
Which Travelers Will Benefit from VI and Which Won’t?
While VI offers numerous undeniable benefits, it’s important to consider one key factor. Since there are no formal agreements between the airlines included in a VI itinerary, you will need to check in separately for each connecting flight and manage your own baggage transfers throughout the journey. However, the service is designed to provide ample time to complete these tasks.
Who’ll Benefit from VI:
- Those comfortable with self-transfers
- Those open to varied itineraries with multiple stopovers
- Those looking to save money by combining low-cost carriers and traditional airlines
- Those prioritizing cost savings over convenience
- Frequent flyers experienced with different airports and travel procedures
- Travel enthusiasts who enjoy exploring new routes and complex itineraries
Who is Unlikely to Benefit from VI:
- Travelers with mobility issues may struggle with the self-transfer process
- Families with children may prefer the simplicity of direct flights or traditional itineraries
- First-time or inexperienced travelers might find the self-transfer process difficult
- Business travelers or those with tight schedules who need to minimize travel time
But even with the trade-offs requiring self-service, Trip Ninja helps Ovago minimize the missed connection risks. Let’s check out how.
How Trip Ninja Helps Ovago Mitigate Our Customers’ Self-Transfer Risks
Trip Ninja has partnered with VariFlight, a global leader in aviation data intelligence and analytics, to utilize VariFlight’s extensive historical flight on-time performance data. With this data, Trip Ninja allows Ovago to set the maximum allowable probability of missed connections for any VI itinerary. By configuring this parameter in Trip Ninja’s Admin Portal, our specialists ensure that customers are presented only with itineraries that meet acceptable risk thresholds, ensuring a comfortable and reliable travel experience.
Read also: Simplify Your Travel Visa Application: A Guide for Tourists, with Special Focus on US Citizens
More Reasons Why We Consider Trip Ninja the Best VI Provider for Our Customers
These advantages highlight why Trip Ninja’s data-source independent VI technology is a game-changer in the travel industry, providing unmatched flexibility, coverage, reliability, and cost efficiency:
- Affordable & Abundant Options. Integration with a variety of data sources enables Trip Ninja to find the most competitive fares by comparing prices across different platforms. This often results in significant cost savings and a broader spectrum of flight options for travelers.
- Dynamic Pricing. The capability to aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources supports dynamic pricing strategies, offering real-time price adjustments to capture the best deals.
- Market Adaptability. The ability to work with various data sources allows Trip Ninja to swiftly adapt to changes in the market or data availability. If one data source becomes less competitive or unavailable, the technology can seamlessly switch to another, ensuring uninterrupted service.
- Optimized Matching. With access to extensive data, Trip Ninja’s algorithms can better match flights based on timing, cost, and availability, resulting in more optimized and convenient travel solutions for our customers.
- Scalability. Data-source independence allows Trip Ninja’s technology to scale efficiently, incorporating new airlines and data sources as they become available. This continuous innovation keeps the platform ahead in a competitive market.
Wondering how to use our VI flight service options? Simply utilize our advanced flight search by selecting economy class travel, or contact our agents via the website live chat. You’ll see various flight booking options, and if you choose a VI one, our agent will notify you and provide all the details of your upcoming flight. Fly with Ovago and enjoy a variety of deals, promotions, convenient installment payment options, and other budget-friendly flight choices. Happy travels!
