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About

FerryGateway (FGW) is a non-profit initiative that was started 2014 by 8 major European Ferry companies. FGW maintains an Open source and Free to use worldwide standard for communication between Ferry Operator and Agent reservation systems.
If you will communicate with more than one you should use our one-to-many FerryGateway Switch that gives you easier setup, administration and updates of new versions.

Introduction

The FerryGateway Standard, opens new opportunities for both Ferry operators, Agents and other Travel organizations and is beneficial both from a commercial and technical point of view. The two very most important benefits are that Ferrygateway is one common worldwide standard and that it embraces all important products and services that ferry operators may wish to sell online.

Benefits

The benefits can be summarized by the following.

  • Improved image; the ferry industry can act with one voice and thereby create higher visibility on the travel market. By working together there are greater opportunities for increased business and this will make it possible to create strategic partnership or alliances with major players on the travel market.
  • Increased revenue; FerryGateway enables the ferry operators to sell a rich product range through agents. Hence it makes it possible for customers to pre-order the vast majority of the available services and products on-board.
  • Easy connectivity; one standard makes it easier for agents and other partners to connect and brings lower distribution costs for ferry operators, agents and gateway providers. It also means a standardised way to connect to local or regional partners.
  • Standard controlled by the ferry industry; some of the power is turned over to the ferry industry instead of being at middlemen. It means that the interest and business of the ferry operators are drivers for development.

Background

The background to FerryGateway is that many Ferry companies experienced difficulties to reach out with their offerings to customers that are using different kinds of agent channels to search for ferry travel. The older standards like Unicorn have too many limitations and the standard has also been partly diluted throughout the years with dialects as a result. This has also ended up with many in-house built solutions that even more have increased the complexity and the cost for maintenance and development.

Another important factor is that the Ferry operators want to be in control over the standard rather than leaving that responsibility to middlemen or other organisations. It is also a fact that the Ferry industry needs to act more intensively as one Business thereby attracting major players in the travel market to cooperate and market the Ferry option as a true choice for leisure travel.

The development of the standard is driven by the members of the FerryGateway Association and their commercial and technical resources.

FerryGateway Association

FerryGateway is defined, developed, controlled, supported and maintained by the FerryGateway Association and the objective is that FerryGateway is the only worldwide standard replacing all existing ones. In addition there should be no need whatsoever to alter the standard for different purposes.

Implementation

Implementation of the FerryGateway standard protocol is increasing with agents, ferry operators and reservation system providers.

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download the FerryGateway standard.