Why travel agency mid- and back-office systems are key to mass adoption of NDC

June 14, 2022

5 Min read

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Jörg Hauschild

Managing Director, Midoco

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Amadeus is making NDC-enabled content available around the world in 2021.

If you’ve booked a flight lately through your usual travel agency, you might have noticed new flight offers and services were being offered. Recently, while I was booking a flight on the website of a travel agency, I was offered an on-board food voucher at a discount if I purchased it in advance; it was something I had never seen before. These innovations in travel retailing are made possible by NDC, a data exchange format that helps airlines distribute richer offers and services through travel sellers for a more tailored experience.

We’re entering an exciting era in travel retailing because more airlines and travel sellers than ever before are becoming NDC ready. However, there’s one other very important piece in the puzzle to speed up the industry’s retailing journey: mid- and back-office systems (MBOs) need to be NDC-ready too.

What are mid- and back-office systems (MBOs)?

Working with an MBO makes travel sellers’ lives easier. AtMidoco , we take care of everything from importing booking data from global distribution systems and other supplier reservation systems, to the creation and delivery of booking confirmations and invoices and more. For travel companies using Midoco, booking data imported can be processed through multiple channels into one centralized workflow, thereby enabling smooth post-booking operations. In other words, all the magic that happens behind the scenes from the time a booking is made to the time a ticket is issued and payments are made and processed, that’s what we do.

How MBOs can add value with NDC

MBOs have a big role to play in the travel industry, especially when it comes to NDC adoption. In fact, Midoco has been working closely with Amadeus since 2018 to become one of the first MBOs to be NDC ready. Essentially, we close the workflow gap for varying booking sources to allow the receipt and processing of travel booking information, regardless of the channel or mode of transmission (Amadeus Interface Record, XML, JSON etc). As an established MBO it’s our responsibility to make NDC-sourced content easy to consume for retailers. We were therefore very happy to see that Amadeus has limited the disruption for the mid- and back office flow by maintaining the consistency in the message format these systems are used to. Limiting change in this part of the ecosystem reduces friction and will thereby accelerate NDC adoption at scale.

To give you an idea of what this looks like in practice, here is a concrete snapshot of how Midoco provides value for travel agencies and their customers:

Processing of all documents generated in Amadeus (Edifact or NDC-enabled content)
Identification of the content source (Edifact/NDC) for differentiated control of service charges
Documentation of all tickets (ticket issuance/change/refund etc.)
Provision of all ticket data for back-office/reporting/payment systems
Ensuring the same, automated processes for NDC-enabled content as for other sources
Easy and comparable reporting

Learnings from Midoco on becoming NDC-ready

From Midoco’s perspective, NDC is just another content channel. The Amadeus partnership with Midoco is very strong. The level of skills and understanding of the Amadeus system is high, and our strong working relationship helped us go from initial discussion to final phase testing and go-live very smoothly. Here are a few key take-aways that helped us become NDC ready:

Consulting: Midoco has been a regular part of the IATA Airline RetailingImplementation Forums so that the MBO point of view is heard and that we take responsibility as NDC was developed. By doing so we understood this approach won’t just benefit us, but all MBOs following in our footsteps.

Collaboration: We pride ourselves in the close collaboration we have with our travel seller partners to understand their needs and their clients’ needs. Thanks to our long-term client relationships, we understand how to best optimize workflows in complex retailing environments.

Experimentation: With Amadeus, we kept testing, learning and improving throughout our collaboration. We were able to experiment with the activation of NDC-enabled content in a test system for the creation of our own test data for all processes relevant to ticketing.

Coincidentally these learnings align with the strategies identified in Amadeus’NDC Spotlight paper on the path to NDC industrialization, with commentary from over 10 industry players from airlines to travel agencies and corporations..

Conclusion: the time to act is now

Amadeus is already working with 100s of MBOs around the world to help them get NDC-ready. We hope more will join us in this journey, because the entire travel industry—and travelers—will benefit if travel agents can consume and process NDC booking information at scale. MBOs have a big responsibility, because if we aren’t ready, then many agencies will continue to rely on people-intensive manual processes. As the adoption of NDC increases this is not a scalable situation. Therefore, it is imperative for agencies to be able to handle NDC efficiently across the entire data flow – from booking to invoicing to reconciliation and everything in between.

As more airlines provide more NDC-enabled content, travel sellers need to be able to sell this content to differentiate themselves. MBOs play a key role to simplify and accelerate this transition for the industry. Close collaboration, testing and learning and being bold enough to shift to systems and processes that are NDC compatible are all fundamental ingredients to accelerate this change, so the travel industry and travelers can get a fast-pass to modern digital retailing.

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