BCD Travel to Pilot NDC Connections with Lufthansa Group

BCD Travel and Lufthansa Group—Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, Swiss and Brussels Airlines—have initiated a multi-year agreement that will allow BCD to test IATA's New Distribution Capability standard and book Lufthansa Group content. NDC, which has gained significant momentum since last year with GDS providers recently making their most dramatic moves toward the standard, has reached a maturity threshold that BCD VP of global distribution and channel strategy Thane Jackson said now warrants a concerted focus from the travel management company side to explore its potential for clients. 

"We are looking to ensure we have the capability to provide the value that airlines are seeking to produce by enabling NDC," said Jackson, citing the promise of corporate customized bundles and potentially personalized offers to individuals. "We want to see what is actually coming down those pipes today, and as airlines fully articulate their strategies, we want to be in a position to consume that content and offer it [to our clients] in the future."

The first step in that effort will be a pilot program within the offline agent environment with small and midsize companies—likely in Germany and potentially the U.K.—that meet specific criteria like limited demand for online booking and that "are happy to accept limitations and costs that might exist," said Jackson. 

For example, it is currently unclear how easily and to what extent the TMC can access bookings to make changes or provide other services. There are questions around how well NDC content will facilitate interlining with other carriers for complex trips. Jackson also questioned how operations for after-hours assistance might be affected. "These things are not fully understood," he said, and pilot participants will need to contend with them. 

That said, objective of the pilot is to push through some of those challenges and explore the maturity levels of handful of providers and how well they can integrate with BCD's current systems. "We don't want additional workload or challenges for agents," Jackson said, adding that the technology ultimately will have to support all the relevant data fields to ensure duty of care, reporting and servicing. "All the things we do today."  

Testing will commence in the first quarter of 2019 with two non-GDS aggregators, which Jackson declined to identify. The first will run for approximately three months to get a robust set of initial data. "We have yet to determine the exact path. We want to establish whether one [aggregator] is more efficient than another and which one is more developed in its consumption of the Farelogix API because that sits behind every connection anyway." In the future, Jackson said, there would likely be additional pilots with GDS providers "because that's where we are going to gain scale."

Cost will be an issue, and not just for the TMC. "We know there will be additional cost," said Jackson. "If you are integrating additional technology that's not part of the chain today, it doesn't come free. Less efficient agent workflows will drive costs. Storing those bookings will drive costs." And corporates that want to access these more customized and personalized content pipes will need to be ready to pay for them. "Booking process fees were introduced a year ago, along with our peers in the industry, and that will be reflected in our price to customers here as well," said Jackson.

Asked what success will look like for the initial pilot, Jackson incapsulated the experimental nature of the effort. "I guess I'll be able to answer that after first quarter 2019."