Welcome to BTN's monthly roundup of business travel and distribution and technology topics as discussed on social media channels. In recent weeks, industry insiders discussed the New Distribution Capability schema, the potential effect of new partnerships on offers and orders, and payments.
NDC Schema and Ancillaries
Riaan van Schoor
Agentivity CEO Riaan van Schoor on LinkedIn posited that the New Distribution Capability schema "allows the airline to be so free in how they describe their product, it ends up getting ignored" because it's not a standard. He gave an example of an XML snippet for baggage allowance text from NDC v17.2. If it were a standard, he said, there would be a "service of type 'baggage allowance,' and inside of that an allowance level, and THEN marketing or description text." He closed noting that the industry wants AI and newer tech to makes things better. "It won't, not till we solve this root issue."
Ashima G.
Product manager of air supply for American Express Global Business Travel Ashima G. agreed. "It's crazy to see the kind of tagging I am seeing on ancillaries right now for NDC! Also not just tagging but also how ancillary offers are made. Some ancillaries will have a single offer across multi segment and [the] same airlines will have different ancillary offer IDs, but everything else [the] same across the multi segment. … It's practically custom development to fetch information for some carriers. But I have hope. Airline retailing will eventually hopefully see some more common standardization."
Martin Crowley, executive chairman at Travica, also agreed. "Now multiply that example by 1 million X and you get the scale of the chaos this cursed project is creating!! No standard, no solution."
Offer-and-Order Partnerships
Hyowon Kim
Hyowon Kim, who most recently worked at Sabre and previously was at Amadeus, on LinkedIn noted the wave of new partnership announcements in the wake of the International Air Transport Association's annual general meeting, but asked, "How will partnerships work in the Offer and Order world?" She suggested codeshare tie-ups as currently constituted would fade but interline partnerships would remain, and cited a few factors to consider, including the cost of interline shopping, itinerary building, duplication, fairness versus consistency in multi-carrier offers, response time and order management.
Roland Heller
Roland Heller, founder and senior advisor at TIK Systems in Thailand and an IATA NDC and One Order consultant and advisor, asked why codeshares would disappear. His prediction: "some codeshares will disappear. Some will remain. Depending on the business, restrictions and market. Yes, where's the schedule database? I always wondered who produced the Airline Profile crime—something totally useless. Maybe a good idea for ATPCO instead of spending time and resources on product catalogs."
Karyn Fernandes
"Of course a retailer, or any other (digital) enterprise would not just fire-off random requests to another (digital) enterprise," replied former Air France-KLM exec Dirk-Vincent Gemke to Heller. "That is why there are codeshare and interline agreements, and, for the new world of air travel, the more digitally appropriate SRSIA's: to make sure that before the first request for offer is sent retailers and suppliers make agreements on the exact services, T&C and (settlement) prices they can mutually agree to. So the 'supplier profile' and 'supplier catalog' are on the table way before offers are made and orders taken."
Eric Léopold
Product consultant Karyn Fernandes, who previously worked at Sun Country Airlines in pricing strategy and revenue analysis, solicited Kim's thoughts on what she called "alternative interline," citing Dohop as an example, "not to be confused with virtual interline. Is it a viable path forward?" Kim suggested the concept was worth exploring.
IATA Panelists on Payment
Eric Léopold, Threedot founder and a former IATA executive, attended the IATA AGM in Delhi and shared on LinkedIn what a few panelists said about payment, including:
- "The payment topic should be discussed in airline boardrooms."
- "We should explore how to improve payment for corporates, for example by leveraging BSP."
- "Payment is also about customer experience."
- "New generations want to split payments or to use digital wallets."
- "Many countries have direct bank transfer payments, not only credit cards."
Praveen Kumar
TPConnects chief technology officer Praveen Kumar responded that "payments need a deeper look—particularly when it comes to split payouts, where a single transaction is distributed to multiple recipients such as the travel agency (commission, markup) and the merchant of record. Why isn't this capability extended to all service delivery vendors (like eSIM providers, lounge access partners, etc.) in real time."
Van Schoor replied: "It's time for a serious awakening amongst the traditional carriers that more modern ways to accept payment is critically needed. BSP [billing and settlement plan] is not going to meet the expectations of today's consumer, especially when the order is more than just air."