Articles tagged “ndc”

For years, airlines, travel agencies, and their technology partners acknowledged they could adopt more modern ways of selling plane tickets. The sticking point lately has been less technological than commercial. Thursday's deal is a seismic moment serving as a model for how the sector might afford to transition to the future.

It's ironic that new distribution capabilities got to the cusp of becoming real at the precise moment everyone stopped booking flights.

Travel agencies can say goodbye to old-school excel spreadsheets and paper agreements for keeping track of airfare sales. Today, digitalization provides a much easier and powerful tool to manage incentive and commission contracts with airlines.

New Distribution Capability (NDC) standards will help facilitate greater personalization and easier distribution of all elements of the ticket sale. However, it isn’t a catch-all solution for all of the airline industry’s retailing challenges. Recognizing that is key to implementing NDC standards the right way.

What’s in store for the business travel sector in 2020? Our newest trend report, created in partnership with corporate travel management leader TripActions, offers a prediction on the 10 trends that will have the biggest impact on business travel in the year ahead.

New distribution technology has a lot of potential to improve booking for business travelers, but first airlines are going to have to make some compromises.

When it comes to implementing and adopting the New Distribution Capability standards for airline retailing, there needs to be a strong focus on enabling scalability, across the entire retailing, distribution, and fulfillment process.

Watching how adoption of new distribution technology plays out in this early stage can give us a look into what to expect in the future. Especially if direct distribution ever moves into other areas of travel booking, like hotels.

Travel agencies can benefit substantially from the level of personalization that NDC offers, but they have to develop new technological capabilities to realize those benefits.

Online travel agencies have been late to the airline sector push to sell airfares and other products in more modern ways. Travix has reached a milestone, though, with the help of tech firm Amadeus, and its story suggests the outline of future trends.