Lufthansa Group in coordination with its subsidiary Lufthansa Process Management in late March signed on to use ATPCO’s Express Contracts tool, BTN has learned. The tool, developed by ATPCO in partnership with Volaro, streamlines the implementation of negotiated contracts between an airline and its corporate travel clients.

The carriers in the group that will use the service include Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, Swiss, Air Dolomiti and Brussels Airlines. 

Including the Lufthansa Group carriers, 26 airlines now use Express Contracts, including United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, GOL Airlines and the recently added Air China, according to ATPCO, along with a “super healthy pipeline.”

About 92 percent of participating airlines’ contracts are being processed and distributed to the market within two hours, and half of those are completed in 30 minutes, compared with a previous average manual processing time of two weeks, according to ATPCO. 

Express Contracts was launched in 2016, and ATPCO recently announced it has processed more than 200,000 negotiated airline contracts through the tool and estimates that it has reduced manual coding time by more than 750,000 hours.