Facilitating NDC adoption at scale

May 23, 2021

Last updated: June 1, 2021

4 Min read

Available in other languages

DE EN

Massimiliano Maini

NDC Industry Expert, Amadeus

Share it!

NDC is one of the biggest changes the industry has seen in a long time: it is a critical enabler in the larger vision of enhanced travel retailing, a way for airlines to provide attractive and more personalized relevant offers in real-time to travelers. However, with multiple versions and interpretations at play, reaching widescale adoption is more difficult than expected, but not impossible. Despite the pandemic and the disruption to the travel industry, NDC remains a priority at Amadeus and for our partners: airlines and travel agencies realize the need for standards to improve critical servicing and communication functions, as a steppingstone to rebuild traveler confidence.

Through regular conversations with partners in our NDC [X] advisory forum, we have compiled use cases and recommendations for standards into a guide.In previous blogs, we featured several examples of these use cases includingnon-IATA identification, ancillaries, mark-ups ,servicing, offer management and order management.Now, in this third and final blog of the series, we spotlight suggestions for how delegation flow, structured data and search options can enhance and help pick up the pace of NDC adoption.

Example 1: Delegation Flow

Today, most implementations of NDC restrict access to the order. This means that whoever is the creator of the order is the only one who can read or modify it. This blocks the ability for a travel seller to delegate access to an order and actions related to their reservation to other entities or a third party, which is a roadblock to NDC adoption for some travel sellers.

A better approach is to allow delegation between travel seller entities while of course keeping control of this on airline side. As an example, if an agent shops and creates the order, that agent becomes the owner of the record; and his or her identification is used between the agent/aggregator and the airline. However, if the agent mandates a third-party actor to perform any action on the order, like payment or exchange, the third party’s identification is used between the agent/aggregator and the airline. When receiving the third party’s transaction request, an airline will have a complete view of the process, starting from the original agent who created the order at the third party’s request, and will then decide whether to accept or deny it. An airline could manage these permissions internally or trust the aggregator (that often already manages this kind of permissions across sellers).

Example 2: Structured Data

For travel seller adoption, properly structured data for offer conditions and services descriptions (e.g. free baggage allowance) are necessary. Free text does not allow systems to correctly process the information to sort, filter, display and manage the offers and orders.

For example, in several current implementations ancillary services are not well categorized, and the service code, service name and description vary from one airline to another. While some airlines use OXY, others use OXYGEN. This behavior is slowing down adoption as it affects the ability of the travel seller to efficiently access the desired ancillary, and also restricts the ability to properly execute a modern display, hindering search by attribute in the process. We suggest that airlines either use the ATPCO categorization to ease integration or adopt the IATA Taxonomy.

Example 3: Search Option

Travel sellers are in touch with the traveler (or corporation) so it is normal they have a good understanding of his/her needs. For airlines to be able to provide relevant and personalized offers it is essential that the seller is allowed to communicate to the airline any information that can influence the offer creation. This shopping context, along with shopping options (that, for example, allows one to efficiently consider corporate policies), is a key component of the entire retail process and as an industry we should think more about “what I’d like to know about the customer” than “what I can currently process?”.

And all this should be done keeping in mind that most of the time a travel seller operates in a multi-airline environment: usage of airline-specific codes (or worse, flows) should be discouraged in favor of a more standard, cross-airlines approach. Bespoke, airline-specific features and behaviors (or worse, flows) are usually a tactical approach: they do not bode well for success with large scale adoption.

Time to Accelerate Adoption

NDC defines a common language shared between key stakeholders of the travel industry. It not only facilitates richer communication between airlines and travel sellers, but also helps personalize travel offerings. Now that overall maturity on NDC is steadily rising in all areas (including not only the standard itself, but also the mutual understanding of the different actors’ needs and objectives) it’s time to go beyond early adopters and let NDC and the benefits it brings reach a larger audience. This can be accelerated by implementing suggestions like the above, allowing NDC to reach its full potential.

Want to learn more about the work we are doing with our partners to facilitate standards to accelerate NDC adoption? Download the guide here .

TO TOP