Q&A: How Hitit Oxygen Is Helping Airlines Navigate the Modern Retailing Transition

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Today’s consumers can reorder groceries, manage subscriptions, and customize streaming services in seconds because those industries run on modern digital commerce foundations. Those same expectations are now reshaping air travel, as the airline industry advances a similar transformation through IATA’s Offers and Orders initiative, which gives carriers greater flexibility to create, sell, and service customized combinations of fares, seats, and add-ons.

While progress has been uneven, the direction is clear. Passengers increasingly judge airlines on how easy and manageable the entire journey feels, not just on price or punctuality, according to Skift Research.

Against this backdrop, airlines are beginning to test how modern retailing principles translate into live operational environments. Hitit Oxygen, an airline retailing and passenger service platform built around offer-and-order concepts, went live with Pegasus Airlines in June 2025. While Pegasus represents the first production deployment, Hitit says it is in discussions with additional carriers as interest grows around more incremental approaches to modernizing retail and passenger service systems.

SkiftX spoke with Hitit CEO Nevra Onursal Karaagac about how airlines are approaching modern retailing, what a successful transition requires, and where Hitit Oxygen fits into that evolution.

SkiftX: How would you characterize the scale and urgency of the industry’s shift toward IATA’s modern retailing framework?

Nevra Onursal Karaagac: Modern airline retailing is one of the most significant transformations the industry faces. It is increasingly viewed not as an optional innovation but as a strategic imperative, with decisions now being made at the C-suite level.

To deliver this transformation efficiently, the transition period where legacy and modern systems run in parallel should be kept as short as possible. We are confident that the technology is ready to accelerate the journey toward 100% offers and orders, but broader airline adoption is needed for the industry to move at scale.

With airlines under pressure to move beyond legacy systems, how is Hitit Oxygen designed to support the transition to modern airline retailing?

Hitit Oxygen is Hitit’s offer and order management system, designed to support the transition to a modern, end-to-end airline retailing model without legacy system constraints.

The platform is aligned with IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC), a standard that enables airlines to create and distribute more dynamic and personalized offers, and ONE Order, which replaces traditional tickets and multiple records with a single, unified order. It supports the latest schema versions and is passenger service system (PSS) agnostic.

The platform uses a product catalog to dynamically bundle and price all offerable elements of a flight and creates orders that act as a single source of truth across systems, removing reliance on legacy artifacts such as passenger name records (PNRs), electronic tickets (e-tickets), reservation booking designators (RBDs), or electronic miscellaneous documents (EMDs).

To support airlines through this transition, Hitit Oxygen also includes a legacy communication layer to accommodate existing business requirements.

When you introduced Hitit Oxygen at last year’s IATA Offers and Orders Forum, what response did you receive? 

The response reflected a broader shift in the industry conversation. Seeing a full-scale deployment operating in production helped move discussions from “if” modern retailing would take hold to “when,” and in some cases, “how soon.”

Our core message when we unveiled Hitit Oxygen with Pegasus was that it was fully active and running in a live production environment, rather than in a test or sandbox setting.

The timing was ideal, as both Hitit and Pegasus were looking to move early, while many airlines were still working through the implications of modern airline retailing and were in the early stages of adopting IATA’s Business Reference Architecture, a common framework that helps airlines redesign how products are created, sold, and serviced. Hitit’s capabilities in NDC and ONE Order, combined with Pegasus’ swift business alignment, provided the technical foundation to move Hitit Oxygen into live production.

What does the live deployment with Pegasus Airlines demonstrate about the platform’s readiness and real-world applicability?

The production deployment has shown that Hitit Oxygen is not a limited, lab-based pilot, but a full-scale solution capable of supporting live retail and servicing at meaningful volumes. It has demonstrated that an airline can transition to an offer-and-order model without disrupting sales continuity, even at scale. Pegasus carries more than 35 million passengers annually and plans to process around 12 million of them through Hitit Oxygen by the end of 2026.

You’ve stated that Hitit Oxygen is the largest-scale offer-and-order system currently in live production. What does that scale enable that smaller pilot programs cannot?

The scale of Hitit Oxygen has allowed us to demonstrate that the solution can already support complex third-party distribution scenarios, including ancillary providers, without compromising performance in a live environment. Critical factors, such as latency and response times, are non-negotiable in the context of an offer and order management system, and smaller pilots cannot generate sufficient data to prove capability at this level. 

The current volume processed through Hitit Oxygen also provides a rich data set that can be used for optimization and real-time operational insights.

Airlines vary significantly in terms of size, region, and business model. How does the platform support a tailored transition for each carrier?

The modular, PSS-agnostic architecture of Hitit Oxygen enables airlines to integrate offers and orders across selected channels, business domains, or markets at their own pace. Before any technical transformation takes place, we bring airline business units together to walk through the additional value that can be generated through the modern airline retailing architecture, including the role of Hitit Oxygen. This helps airlines define their expectations and develop an appropriate plan to achieve them. We then support that plan by providing the necessary technical capabilities. 

What does an effective transition plan look like for an airline preparing for offer-and-order adoption?

Given the scale of the transformation and the breadth of change required across airline operations, the most effective approach is one initiated at the C-suite level, with a clear vision of what the airline aims to achieve once it is fully operating on offers and orders. To support this process, we have developed a template that airline executives and business leaders can use to understand the scope of the modern airline retailing initiative, prioritize key focus areas, and develop a transition plan.

What misconceptions or concerns do airlines commonly have about modernization? 

The transition is often treated as a narrowly scoped IT project, focused primarily on replacing PNRs with order IDs and assumed to involve long timelines and high costs. This framing can quickly trigger resistance to offer and order management systems, particularly when tangible benefits such as new revenue opportunities and process simplification are overlooked. Our approach starts by broadening that perspective, moving beyond the constraints of fixed coupons, limited RBDs, static fares, and telex-based messaging toward a retailing model built around real-time updates, a more flexible architecture, and a clearly defined transition plan.

Our current standing in the IATA Airline Retailing Maturity Index, along with the fact that our solution supports a large, high-volume airline operating at a global scale, has helped address some of these misconceptions.

That said, concerns remain, particularly beyond distribution and retailing, in areas such as delivery and settlement, where industry standards are still evolving and interpretations can vary. We are actively participating as a strategic partner in IATA’s working groups to support the development and alignment of these standards.

What message would you share with airlines as they evaluate technology partners and plan their retail transformation?

When evaluating technology partners, airlines should prioritize alignment with IATA’s NDC and ONE Order standards, as interoperability will be crucial in an environment where multiple systems are orchestrated in real-time. Airlines with deep legacy roots should also be prepared for a longer transition, as not all industry participants are moving toward modern airline retailing at the same pace.

Beyond the technology itself, airlines, particularly those in the early stages of their transformation, should seek a partner that collaborates with them to design the future operating model. Rather than acting solely as an IT provider offering a fixed software product, that partner should help define key performance indicators, milestones, and a clear roadmap. We were able to take this approach in 2025 with Hitit Oxygen and expect to continue building on it.

For more information about Hitit Oxygen and Hitit’s modern airline retailing solutions, click here.

This content was created collaboratively by Hitit and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.