The $96 Lesson That Still Matters for Airline NDC

I’ve been using distribution systems since my first day in a travel agency.

Over the years, I hopped between systems. Amadeus in one office, Sabre or Travelport in another, whichever tech stack the desk required.

From the agency’s perspective, I had no idea how these systems worked in terms of cost. We weren’t paying fees; sometimes, we even earned incentives to book through a particular channel.

The moment it clicked for me came during IATA’s Commercial Airline Foundations course. The real cost to airlines is eye-watering.

The instructor flashed a slide: one PNR, four passengers, four segments. “Guess what the GDS charges the airline for this?” he asked.

We guessed low; the answer was about $96 for that single booking.

I walked out thinking: with charges like that, why wouldn’t airlines build their own distribution systems? at the end of this article I tried to clearly respond to the most frequently asked questions about NDC these days.

NDC’s Promise vs. the Plumbing

NDC sounded like the answer.

It promised richer retailing, direct control, and relief from 20th-century EDIFACT tolls. Airlines could publish dynamic offers, bundle ancillaries, and own the shelf.

But XML is a language, not a law and here each carrier spoke a slightly different dialect. Behind the layers of retail gloss, the pipes mattered.

Offer systems had to handshake with the PSS, Orders had to reconcile with finance. Refunds had to pass audit.

TMCs needed exchanges, waivers, duty-of-care, and reporting that behaved the same way every day.

Great storefronts still fell over at the servicing counter.

Bottom line: the vision was right; the sequence (governance → servicing → scale) was off.

The Operating System usually Underestimated: PNR Logic

If websites are the shop window, the PNR is the operating system.

Revenue management, interline, proration, disruption—most airline biology still runs on PNR/RBD logic.

IATA’s One Order seeks to fold ticket, PNR, and EMD into a single order ID. Elegant on paper; surgical in production.

Change the OS, and you change the airline.

You can ship beautiful shopping in weeks.

You win trust when reissues, refunds, invoices, and reporting are boringly reliable. Partners won’t move volume until that day arrives.

Translation: retail sells the dream; servicing makes it real.

“Personalization” Isn’t a Protocol but a Practice

We hoped NDC would melt rigid booking classes.

In reality, even modern retailers anchor to simple fences and clear price cascades.

The most “dynamic” outcomes come from disciplined catalogs and data loops, not protocol alone.

XML doesn’t substitute for pricing craft and process discipline.

Net effect: protocol helps; practice decides.

Adoption & Spend: The Part No One Puts in a Press Release

Twelve years in, NDC volume is meaningful but modest in global indirect channels.

A good chunk of bookings sits in direct or curated partner pipes.

Industry spend for airlines, TMCs, GDS, and vendors lands in the billions once you tally rewrites and opportunity costs.

The persistent choke point remains post-ticket servicing.

Read that twice: retail moved faster than the warehouse.

Plot Twist: GDS Didn’t Disappear,They Pivoted

Airlines tried to route around tollbooths; the tollbooths became on-ramps.

Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport reframed as offer/order platforms, wrapping NDC with uptime, tooling, and scale.

Several early NDC leaders now lean on these platforms to make content bookable and serviceable at volume.

Old segment fees give way to API/merchandising economics, but the distribution muscles remain.

Result: not the end of GDS—the end of GDS-as-we-knew-it.

Why Governance Was (and Is) the Quiet Bottleneck

If XML is language, governance is grammar.

Early on, we lacked version locks, SLAs, and common servicing baselines. That birthed a bazaar of “almost compatible” endpoints that broke when anyone blinked.

Evangelism created momentum; neutral engineering authority would have saved millions in rework.

Lesson: standards need referees, not just cheerleaders.

What Actually Works in Airline NDC (Unromantic, Scalable)

• Freeze a version. Commit to one NDC version for the year; build test harnesses; honor SLAs.

• Service first. Fund exchanges, refunds, and invoices before glossy bundles.

• Publish a change calendar. No Friday surprises for partners.

• Insist on parity. Coverage, uptime, and disruptions must match EDIFACT before forcing migration.

• Automate the ugly. Waiver ingestion, tax recalculations, audit exports, and reconciliation.

• Do this, and volume moves without a press release.

  
  

Where This Leaves Our Previous Posts

In our earlier April piece, we wrote that GDS-era economics were ending—and the bridge there would be bumpy.

That’s largely what unfolded: surcharges, direct-only content, and strategic returns to GDS aggregation when scale and servicing mattered.

Two truths coexist: pricing power is shifting to airlines, while plumbing power still sits with the integrators who do boring things well.

That isn’t capitulation; it’s sequencing that protects customers while retail evolves. Pragmatism > purity wins this transition.

A Field Guide for 2026 (If You Own the P&L)

• Blend channels by design. Use GDS-hosted NDC as scaffolding while direct APIs mature.

• Make governance a product. Docs, mocks, sandboxes, and release notes are partner UX.

• Measure the right KPIs. Service completion rates, refund latency, disruption recovery—not just % via NDC.”

• Invest in catalogs. Clean product and ancillary definitions beat flashy front ends.

• Timebox experiments. Pilot fast, kill faster, and scale only when servicing is dull.

• Remember: customer experience fails at the touchpoints no one demos.

  
  

What I Tell Teams When the Room Gets Quiet

Start with the $96 moment.

Ask where you are truly buying freedom by using Airline NDC instead of the old distribution model.

Channel cost, Content control, Customer ownership, Ancillary sales Or long-term retailing capability?

Spend there first.

Use GDS platforms as scaffolding while you harden your own offer and order core, especially servicing and finance.

Force-rank every feature by its impact on post-ticket outcomes, not homepage glamour.

Treat governance as a product.

Versioning, documentation, test environments, release notes, and SLAs are not admin work. They are the partner experience.

And to the question I asked years ago in that IATA classroom: "Why don't airlines just build their own pipes?"

My answer has matured now, they can and they should but pipes are only useful when water flows cleanly through them.

That is where the next phase of NDC begins.

Not with a louder promise, Not with another "GDS is dead" headline and not with a demo that works beautifully until the passenger changes the ticket.

The next chapter is about the questions now being searched by airline teams, travel sellers, technology providers, and increasingly, by AI itself.

So let's answer them plainly. I have brought few frequently asked question about NDC and tried my best to answer them based on current status.

What Is Next for NDC in Airline Distribution?

The next phase of NDC is less about proving the standard exists and more about proving it can operate at scale.

That might sound less exciting but it is where the money is.

NDC has already shown the industry a better way to display and sell airline content. IATA defines NDC as a data exchange format based on offer and order management, designed to help airlines create and distribute relevant offers across channels.

It also describes NDC as an XML-based standard that improves communication between airlines and travel agents, with the aim of richer content, product differentiation, and more transparent shopping.

Well....that is the promise, but it needs to be tested.

Can it support exchanges? refunds? disruption handling? corporate policy?

Can it support finance, audit, reporting, interline, and all the other dull things customers only notice when they fail?

In other words, NDC is moving from the shop window to the warehouse.

And as anyone in aviation knows, the warehouse usually decides whether the shop survives.

Is NDC Replacing GDS or Changing the Role of GDS?

This is probably the most common question.

The honest answer is: neither side gets the clean victory it once imagined.

NDC has not killed the GDS, it has changed what the GDS must become.

The original dream was simple: Airlines would use NDC to move closer to customers, control content, reduce dependency on legacy distribution, and avoid paying expensive tolls for every booking, Fair enough but scale is a stubborn animal.

Agencies still need comparison shopping, TMCs still need duty of care, Corporates still need reporting, Finance teams still need clean records.

Passengers still need changes, refunds, receipts, and recovery when the trip goes sideways.

This is why the GDSs did not vanish but adapted.

Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, aggregators, and other technology providers are increasingly acting as NDC enablers, not just legacy distribution pipes.

Business Travel News has also noted that airlines, booking tools, GDSs, and other companies have continued announcing NDC partnerships to make NDC content bookable, while airlines are also moving toward offer and order management technologies.

The result is more practical than dramatic.

Airlines want control, Travel sellers want usability, Customers want the trip to work.

The winner is not the party with the purest ideology. The winner is the party that can make all three happen at the same time.

What Does Offer and Order Mean in Airlines?

Offer and Order is where NDC starts becoming something bigger.

NDC is often the distribution rail.

Offer and Order is the operating model airlines are trying to move toward.

In the old world, airline retailing is built around several separate artifacts: PNRs, tickets, EMDs, fare rules, booking classes, and settlement processes. Each does a job. Each has history. Each also adds complexity.

Offer and Order tries to simplify that.

The airline makes an offer and customer accepts it, the accepted offer becomes an order, the order becomes the central record of what was bought, what must be delivered, what was changed, what was refunded, and what still needs to happen.

Elegant? Yes, Easy? No.

IATA's modern airline retailing framework describes the industry's transition toward 100% Offers and Orders, supported by NDC, ONE Order, and related standards. The goal is to move airline distribution away from legacy artifacts and toward a more modern retailing model.

That is the destination but the aircraft is not there yet.

Because changing the order model means touching commercial systems, PSS logic, revenue accounting, airport processes, interline settlement, agency workflows, and disruption management.

Change the record, and you change the airline.

That is why Offer and Order is not an IT project, It is business surgery.

Why Is Post-Ticket Servicing So Important for NDC?

Because booking is only the beginning.

This is the part many retailing conversations underplay.

The passenger does not judge the system when everything goes perfectly. They judge it when something changes.

A refund, a missed connection, a schedule change, name correction, waiver, involuntary reroute and seat no longer available.

A corporate traveller who needs an invoice yesterday.

This is where early NDC struggled. The shopping experience often moved faster than the servicing layer.

The latest industry discussion is more encouraging.

One of the most important recent developments has been seeing servicing and post-ticketing functions prove themselves and create operational efficiencies for agencies using direct connects and adoption still varies by airline and agency, but that the schema has now proven fit for purpose.

That is an important shift,

NDC becomes real when servicing becomes boring, not exciting.

Boring.

Boring means reliable, repeatable and it means the agent does not need three screens, two workarounds, and one prayer.

Retail sells the dream, servicing earns the trust.

Why Are Airlines Moving at Different Speeds with NDC?

Because airlines are not starting from the same place, some carriers have modern commercial platforms while some are still deeply tied to legacy PSS structures and have strong direct channels.

Many rely heavily on agencies, consolidators, tour operators, TMCs, or GDS distribution and

few have the budget, internal alignment, and executive patience to modernize.

There are others are trying to keep the aircraft flying, the call centre staffed, and the balance sheet respectable therefore, adoption is uneven.

There are two different speeds of NDC adoption. Airlines, especially in Europe and the United States, are pushing ahead with technology deployment, content differentiation, and distribution strategies. Travel sellers, meanwhile, still face challenges around technology investment and post-ticketing, which is where intermediaries become important.

That distinction matters, airlines may be ready to push, the market still has to absorb and in travel, absorption is rarely tidy.

What Is ONE Order and Why Does It Matter?

ONE Order is the next logical step after NDC.

If NDC helps airlines create and distribute richer offers, ONE Order aims to simplify what happens after the customer says yes.

Today, airline transactions often depend on different records for booking, payment, ticketing, ancillaries, and fulfilment.

A PNR here.

An e-ticket there.

An EMD somewhere else.

Finance trying to reconcile all of it.

The customer, naturally, just thinks they bought a trip.

ONE Order tries to create a single order record that can contain the products and services bought by the customer.

In plain language: fewer fragments, one clearer commercial record.

But this is also where theory meets the engine room.

A single order record has to work across airline partners, airports, disruptions, settlement, ancillaries, corporate travel, loyalty, and customer service.

That is why the move to ONE Order will not happen with a dramatic switch-off ceremony.

It will be a long coexistence.

PNR logic, ticketing logic, NDC, GDS workflows, direct channels, Offer and Order, and ONE Order will live beside each other for years.

Not because the industry lacks ambition.

Because aviation has consequences when experiments fail.

How Will AI Change NDC and Airline Distribution?

AI will change airline distribution in two ways.

First, it will improve the boring work.

That may sound modest, but it is not.

AI can help interpret fare rules, summarize servicing conditions, automate repetitive post-ticketing tasks, detect fraud patterns, support payment flows, and help agents resolve issues faster.

In the supplied transcript, the speakers discuss AI's role across operations, fraud management, payments, retailing, ancillaries, post-ticketing, and personalization. They also discuss natural language processing being used to understand fare rules and servicing situations, allowing agents to complete tasks faster than traditional manual workflows.

That is practical value.

The second change is more strategic.

AI may become a new shopping interface.

A traveller may not begin with an airline website, OTA, or corporate booking tool.

They may ask an AI assistant:

"What is the best flight to Milan if I want one checked bag, lounge access, a reliable connection, and flexibility if my meeting changes?"

That question is not just about fare.

It is about context.

It is about product.

It is about intent.

It is about whether the airline's offer can be understood by a machine before it is recommended to a human.

That is a very different world.

Will AI Replace NDC?

Short answer: Not immediately.

And perhaps not in the way the headline writers would enjoy.

There is now a serious debate about whether AI, agentic systems, and tools such as Model Context Protocol could reduce the need for some traditional travel distribution standards. Reports indicate that industry executives are already asking whether AI will become a structural change in distribution or an optimization layer on top of existing systems. The same debate includes whether AI can understand complexity faster than traditional integration, while others argue that AI is still expensive and that practical use cases matter most.

My view? AI will not remove the need for clean airline content, it will punish airlines that do not have it.

If AI is going to read airline products, compare them, explain them, and recommend them, then airline content must be structured, complete, and commercially meaningful.

Cheap fare? Fine.

But what does it include?

1. What does it exclude?

2. What is refundable?

3. What happens if the connection misfires?

4. What is the seat pitch?

5. What is the baggage rule?

6. What is the brand promise?

This is where NDC and AI may meet.

NDC was partly about helping airlines stop being commoditized.

AI raises the same question again, but at a different level.

Can your airline product be understood by machines without becoming just another fare in a list?

That may become one of the most important retailing questions of the next decade.

Why Is Airline Data Readiness Becoming So Important?

Because personalization is not a slogan.

It is a data discipline.

Airlines have talked about personalization for years. The hard part is not imagining it. The hard part is operationalizing it.

To personalize properly, airlines need to understand the passenger beyond one booking.

• Shopping and Booking behaviour

• Channel preference

• Ancillary history

• Loyalty value

• Disruption sensitivity

• Payment behaviour

• Service history

• Corporate rules

• Travel purpose

None of this works well when data lives in disconnected systems.

Customer data platforms are normally highlighted as a central priority. The move to Offer and Order should focus on tracking customer shopping and booking behaviour across the airline and the wider ecosystem, with the passenger becoming the core data key rather than the reservation.

That is a profound shift, PNR tells you about the trip, passenger record tells you about the customer.

Those are not the same thing.

And any airline serious about modern retailing needs to understand the difference.

What Happens to Travel Agents and TMCs in an NDC World?

They remain essential, but their role changes.

Travel sellers do not disappear because airlines improve direct distribution.

Customers still shop where they trust.

Corporates still need policy control.

Travellers still need support.

Agencies still need aggregated content.

TMCs still need reporting, duty of care, approvals, servicing, and financial controls.

The question is not whether travel sellers survive.

The question is whether their technology keeps up.

This is where intermediaries, aggregators, and GDS-hosted NDC can play a useful role to

They help agencies consume airline offers without building dozens of bespoke connections.

A product that cannot be serviced is not really distributed, it is just displayed.

Why Is the Look-to-Book Problem Getting Worse?

Because modern shopping creates more searches nnd AI may create many more.

Look-to-book is the ratio between shopping requests and actual bookings. In simple terms, how many times systems are hit before one booking is made.

In the old world, that was already a challenge but in the NDC world, richer content and dynamic offers can increase the number of requests.

In the AI world, conversational search may increase it again.

A human may search three options an AI agent may test hundreds.

It is reported that NDC has already increased look-to-book pressure for airlines and technology providers, and that airline technology executives have said AI may exacerbate the issue. Experts mention that commercial models, caching, and better industry constructs as part of the answer.

This is where the plumbing metaphor returns.

Everyone likes better search and no one likes systems falling over.

So the industry will need smarter caching, better prediction, clearer commercial rules, and stronger collaboration between airlines and technology partners.

AI can help yet again can make the mess bigger.

As ever in aviation, the tool is not the strategy.

Who Wins the Next Phase of NDC?

The winner will not be the airline with the best press release but the airline, or partner ecosystem, that makes modern retailing operationally dependable.

That means:

• Clean content.

• Reliable servicing

• Clear governance

• Strong data architecture

• Practical agency workflows

• Scalable APIs

• Order management discipline

• AI-readable product information

And enough humility to know that "direct" is not always better if the customer journey becomes worse.

Industry reporting has noted that while many airlines are implementing NDC, deeper Offer and Order transformation remains at an earlier stage.

That tells us something important: NDC adoption is moving, but the larger retailing transformation is still unfinished.

So what is next for NDC? Less theatre, More discipline.

Less "direct versus indirect." more "which channel serves the customer properly?"

Less obsession with the booking moment more respect for everything after the booking.

And perhaps most importantly, a new question:

When AI starts reading airline offers on behalf of the customer, will your airline still know how to tell its own story?

Because NDC was never only about pipes, It was about control and then it became about retailing.

Now it is becoming about intelligence.

The next battle is not simply who owns the booking, It is who owns the understanding of the product.

And that is where airline distribution gets interesting again.

To learn more about Anjuna GSA services, please visit: https://www.anjunagsa.com/.

• 
  

To learn more about Anjuna, please visit: Anjuna Airline Solutions.