Open Sales and Distribution Model OSDM

The specification covers two aspects:

• Data exchange and sales services for rail products either to provide fare details to combine fares into offers and to provide entire offers for tickets as well. It defines the data structures to define the fares in detail and the combination rules for fares.

The specification covers static fares that can be exchanged as bulk data as well as dynamic fares and offers that need to be requested and booked online. Reservation of places is included to have a harmonized solution for the complete sales service.

A migration is supported by additional data items to cover conversion into the existing data formats 108.1 and to support existing reservation service IRS 90918-1 and accounting data formats IRS 30301.

• A set of services and unified messages to distribute rail content involving all parties in the distribution process.

We started with the customer experience and worked backwards to define the sales and distributions processes supported by OSDM. This resulted in a booking process modelled by the following steps:

1. Searching for trips

2. Getting offers

3. Booking an offer

4. Confirmation of the booking

5. Fulfillment of the booking

Analogously, the after-sale process is modelled in the following steps:

1. Getting a refund/exchange offers

2. Booking a refund/exchange offer

3. Fulfillment of the booking

By involving the experts of the parties (distributors, railways and legal experts), we are confident that the OSDM online standard is powerful enough to support the distribution of existing or upcoming commercial products and can be implemented and supported at reasonable cost.