In the complicated world of airline distribution, NDC is an acronym many use but seemingly few truly understand. In a panel made of travel management companies, airlines and GDS providers openly shared their hopes and hesitations regarding the elusive technology that continues to promise to revolutionise airline retailing.
To offer some background, NDC is an IATA initiative aimed at addressing the current distribution limitations faced by airlines, namely: product differentiation and time-to-market, access to full and rich air content and developing a more transparent shopping experience.
It has the potential to help airlines retail their products better by enabling them to deliver richer content and personalised offer to their customers. (Read this article understand more about NDC.)
While the majority on the panel were still optimistic about what the standard could deliver, there was an air of impatience of when NDC could become standard practice in the complicated and out-dated world of airline distribution.
Marcus Eklund, global managing director, FCM Travel Solutions described NDC as “frustrating” saying, “NDC has so much potential, has been discussed for many years, but we as an industry has delivered very little.”
Renaud Nicolle, VP Business Travel APAC, Amadeus argued that its potential could be realised in two key ways – “by modernising infrastructure to distribute [airline] content most effectively” and boosting the performance and speed of delivering that content to the customer. “You need to bring all the different suppliers on the same interface to sell in a similar, consistent way.”
However, this would require all airlines to take the development of the standard far more seriously and also recognise the degree of industry-wide collaboration it would require to get things moving.
At the moment, NDC has not yet reached a level of true standardisation and airlines have seemed to interpret the standards quite differently, making it difficult to roll it out on a global scale. It is a learning curve airlines must overcome quickly if they truly want to see this new capability take off.
“Some airlines take this more seriously, but others are using NDC as an excuse to put dirty water through the pipes,” said Eklund. He alluded to the concern that while NDC offers better distribution pathways, it would be futile unless airlines (that currently rely on legacy systems) are able to create content-rich offers effectively in the first place.
Ultimately, on top of investments necessary to make airlines NDC-ready, airlines must also invest in modernising their own infrastructure if they are to truly reap the promised future benefits of NDC.
“If NDC is the future digital store front,” analogised Bryan Koh, vice president, e-commerce and distribution, Singapore Airlines, “the complexity of our back-of-house is restricting us from fully realising the vision of NDC to make selling much more creative offerings.”
Being able to deliver more personalised offers and more content-rich data that would allow travellers to get the most value out of their booking, was seen as a powerful tool for airlines to develop closer relationships with their consumers. However, it would require steep initial investment, which Koh indicated was an eight-figure sum.
Nevertheless, Flight Centre Travel Group’s manager of air content and distribution, EMEA, Nicola Ping asserted that live bookings are already being tested, bringing it one step closer to reality.
In fact, Amadeus announced this week that live NDC bookings have been in production since November last year through its “NDC-enabled Web Services solution”. Through a new global partnership with online travel agency Travix, the GDS plans to roll out the solution over the course of the next few months.
Live NDC bookings will offer some confidence and something solid for air travel players to bite into, as they can provide valuable concrete use cases to develop from.
Ping concluded, “The next thing is to make NDC the norm for TMCs and online booking tools, to solve all the problems [facing airline distribution] today, before we move on to the next big thing.”
Lead image: Getty Images
