Sounding Off: Still too many questions and few answers for NDC

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered on our site that week.

IATA New Distribution Capability has traveled a rocky road since it was first announced almost seven years ago.

Both the rocky road and those seven years serve as a stark reminder of how complex the airline distribution landscape is and continues to be.

And recently the tone seems to have shifted to "we’re all collaborating now but this is really hard." Harder than was ever anticipated.

At Sabre’s recent STX event, CEO Sean Menke commented on the “enormous amount of work to do” on all sides.

More significantly, he also said that any prediction for what NDC would look like come 2025 is a “wild guess.”

There are significant hurdles to overcome.

Already, airlines have different flavors of NDC, are at different levels of development and are offering different commercial models - all contributing to the existing complex and somewhat fragmented landscape.

IATA’s NDC@Scale Certification, part of the 2020 goal, should help in that it will require carriers to achieve a certain level and be able to handle volumes of NDC transactions.

But those volumes are unlikely to be more complex than simple point to point bookings.

For the corporate travel community, the all important servicing elements around the booking need to be built into any technology using the NDC standard.

The corporate self-booking tools, an important element of airline distribution, seem to be playing something of a waiting game in terms of integrating NDC content.

And, technology newcomers are finding ways to aggregate NDC content to provide a more efficient means for travel management companies and others to access the content from a single point.

IATA’s frustrations became apparent in April when it accused the GDSs of anti-competitive conduct and holding back “NDC-enabled innovation” in a presentation to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

 As expected the GDSs hit back saying IATA had created the current situation of adoption of the NDC standard “difficult and costly” for the industry.

More recently IATA said it wanted to move away from the NDC terminology to offers and orders.

It’s hard to say whether that’s because the industry has become too bogged down in the complexity of the NDC standard or because offers and orders better reflects the goal of modern airline retailing.

So, when Menke says be believes that come 2025, what the industry ends up with “might not be NDC as we know it today”, it’s hardly surprising.

There are still too many questions to be answered and one of the most critical remains who will pay?