Once upon a time, in the golden age of air travel distribution (let’s say 30 years ago), we the consumers and intermediaries had this magical thing called full content. Airlines — for better or worse — filed all their fares, schedules, and inventory into a GDS. If you were an agent, an OTA, or even a corporate buyer, you got the lot: high fare, low fare, middle fare — all served up in one neat, if cryptic, command-line interface. The GDS was the Amazon of its day — if Amazon required a degree in keyboard wizardry to operate.
Then came the low-cost carriers (LCCs) — Southwest, Ryanair, Gol, Jetstar, and their merry band of disruptors. They looked at the GDS model and said, No thanks. The reasons? Cost, control, and because they could. This wasn’t a small gap in the system — it was a chasm. By 2010, LCCs represented over 30% of global seat capacity, a figure that has since grown to 35% globally, with regions like Europe and Southeast Asia pushing past 50%
Cue the handwringing
The industry’s response? A patchwork of so-called solutions — screen-scraping, DIY APIs, direct connects — most of which aged about as well as milk. Companies like Travelfusion tried to stitch it all together, but let’s be honest: screen-scraping wasn’t a solution — it was a hack. Knitting them together, very inefficient. And when the legal cease-and-desists, CAPTCHAs, and site redesigns hit? The multi-source house of cards proved not to be quite so robust.
Cue the lawsuits.
And for those still clinging to the notion that GDS full content could save the day, along came Sabre’s 2022 loss to American Airlines in court. That ruling finally shattered the last remnants of contractual full-content obligations. The GDS stronghold on comprehensive supply was blown apart. What followed wasn’t order or transparency — but a further splintering of supply, as airlines gained even more freedom to fragment their distribution strategies. Instead of fixing the broken supply chain, the decision widened the cracks.
Offer, order, service, settle, deliver: A new hope… and a new challenge
Enter Offer and Order Management — packaged neatly now as OOSSD (Offer, Order, Service, Settle, Deliver and I know many forget the Service!) The idea? Seamless, modern retailing; dynamic offers; clean servicing; effortless settlement. Sounds lovely. The problem? OOSSD, by design, tries to impose structured pipelines that ironically make multi-source shopping even harder. The lack of a comprehensive standard and plethora of schemas results in literally hundreds of combinations. Each supplier builds its own flavor of OOSSD. The result? A new layer of friction, where stitching together multi-source offers from different vendors – it gets more complex, not less. Intermediaries have to work harder. The consumer ends up being more confused. Brand value suffers.
And yet — it’s in this very tension between fragmentation and enforced structure that innovation has a chance to shine. The industry needs solutions that can intelligently orchestrate across these splintered sources while embracing OOSSD’s promise of modern commerce.
The way forward
The good news? We’re not doomed. But the solution doesn’t lie in doubling down on legacy models. Multi-source shopping is not dead. Instead:
- AgenticAI and MCP-type solutions — These emerging technologies allow multi-source content to be assembled, personalized, and transacted at the edge — not solely by GDSs or OTAs. They put power into the hands of smaller players and consumers.
- A return to true competition — With new tech, the marketplace is no longer locked down by a handful of giant intermediaries. The consumer has choice. The tools are coming that will make that choice meaningful.
- Open architecture or perish — Travel needs its own Open Banking moment. Mandated API access, universal schemas, enforced transparency. OOSSD will only work if it supports, not blocks, multi-source assembly.
- Regulatory nudges — Without a push, the Wild West will continue. It’s time for a transparency mandate — price, inventory, and offer disclosure in plain sight.
Will it happen?
Yes — of that I am convinced. The pressure is too great, the economics of fragmentation too unsustainable. But will it happen soon? Hardly. We’ll slog through more years of half-baked fixes before the industry wakes up. My real question is when?
Until then, multi-source content remains both the industry’s greatest blessing and its most enduring curse — a monument to how travel can take something simple and make it impossibly hard. Maybe that’s by design.
About the author: Timothy O’Neil-Dunne (Principal, T2Impact) is an aviation aficionado, travel industry veteran, consultant and overall tech enthusiast.
