There has been little mention of NDC since the onset of COVID-19 and some in the industry believed the project might be faltering as airlines had bigger fish to fry.
But a white paper published by Amadeus last week revealed that NDC hasn’t stalled and is still being driven as an opportunity for the travel industry to catch up with other digital retailers and the chance to rebuild travel according to the changing needs of all players.
“In the last 18 months, despite the pandemic, momentum around NDC hasn’t stalled, in fact the widely shared vision to focus more on traveller needs and simplify processes has driven much progress,” said the white paper.
Iata recently held its Business Travel Summit and NDC progress discussed at the summit showed that development of NDC had definitely continued during the pandemic and that many airlines had also announced new NDC-powered initiatives. Perry Flint, Head of Corporate Communications for Iata, told Travel News that, despite the catastrophic downturn in air travel caused by the pandemic, the industry’s drive toward airline retailing, of which NDC is a critical component, accelerated in 2020-2021.
Said Flint: “Over the past 18 months, many airlines, technology providers and sellers have maintained retailing as part of their core strategic priorities and our NDC certifications grew by 25% over the last 20 months. GDS announcements suggest they will be technically ready by late 2021/early 2022 and several new entrant aggregators are offering services as well.”
Finnair News last week reported that the airline would stop using legacy Edifact technology to sell tickets and ancillary air products by the end of 2025. Finnair will move to an all-NDC distribution model for agency airline sales. The carrier says it made the move to ramp up pressure for change within the industry. Finnair is the first carrier to completely phase out legacy-supported distribution technology.
Adrian Roodt, Head of Account Management and Director of Travelport Southern Africa, confirmed that the group’s focus remained on further simplifying access to sophisticated, multi-sourced content, like NDC, across all agent workflows. “We continue to invest in NDC and our new APIs have given us the capability to display airline NDC-enabled offers on the same response screens as traditional Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPC) content.”
Said Roodt: “We have enabled a wide range of agencies and their customers – including OTAs, TMCs, consolidators and leisure agencies – to successfully book NDC flights. We are heavily concentrated on the completeness of our NDC offering with the delivery of the end-to-end servicing capabilities agents need to support their customers’ NDC reservations and confidently scale those NDC bookings.”
In the same Amadeus white paper, ‘NDC 2021 and the path to industrialization’, Angel Gallego, Executive VP Travel Distribution at Amadeus said he was optimistic that 2021 would be seen as a pivotal year in the deployment of NDC. “I am encouraged by the fact that we are working with more than 30 airlines on the IT side and with more than 17 airlines for the distribution of their content via NDC through the Amadeus Travel Platform. Approximately 80% of these distribution airline partners have achieved Iata Level 4 certification, and our NDC airline partners together represent nearly 25% of global passenger numbers in 2019, showcasing the commitment and global adoption of NDC worldwide.
“Over 2 500 travel agencies across 50 markets can already book this airline content via NDC through our solutions. And our goal is to make NDC-sourced content available to all Amadeus travel sellers around the world in the course of this year,” added Gallego.
