Taking the long view of American Airlines’ NDC strategy

It’s been a week since “FAArmageddon,” the day American Airlines removed a big chunk of its content from legacy global distribution systems (GDS) workflows. On LinkedIn and industry blogs, you can find wildly divergent views about how that’s going. The “unavoidable disruptions” described by one travel management company paint a different picture than the “just another Monday” cited by another. No matter your preferred narrative about new distribution capability, you’ll find someone who is preaching to your choir.

At AmTrav, we’ve been selling NDC content through a direct connection with American since 2019. Last Monday, with the lowest fares suddenly at stake, we ratcheted up the volume considerably. Since then, for our clients, there have been no “unavoidable disruptions” but there’s been nothing for them to get super excited about either. The $37 per ticket on average that they’ve saved has gone largely unnoticed, which we’re counting as a win for now. For our ops team, while it’s not a fair characterization to say “servicing in NDC doesn’t work,” there are gaps and challenges that we hope will be addressed.

There are other viewpoints too, but, really, it's time to end the 11-year-old debate about NDC. While a few are hoping American reverses course, it’s much more likely, and in fact probable, that other airlines in the United States will follow suit. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and it’s not going back in. Let’s appreciate this watershed moment for travel management.

Cynics point out that the only benefit of NDC is access to fares that could be (and, in fact, were) distributed just fine only a week ago through EDIFACT, the international standard for electronic data interchange. I can quibble with that and talk about the bundled products like Main Plus and Main Select that are now available; or the better, more reliable access to paid seats; or the servicing flows that work better because the airline is (accurately) calculating the additional collection, not the travel agent. But I’ll concede that those modest benefits fall well short of what we’ve been promised.

Then again, lucky they didn’t give up on the automobile when the first ones proved no faster than horses.

Lack of innovation forces clients to compromise

If we look for the forest through the trees, it really doesn’t matter a whole lot what exact fares or features are available in NDC vs. EDIFACT right now.

What matters more is that last week, we as an industry broke some eggs.

Finally.

Many different entities took concrete steps to liberate themselves from the legacy systems and legacy processes that have slowed, watered down or outright blocked almost every bit of innovation in third-party air distribution that has been attempted since the dawn of the internet.

For the next generation of travelers and travel managers, compromise on the booking experience will be a non-starter.

Jeff Klee - AmTrav

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Granted, a lot of what is happening now is trying to shoehorn modern capabilities into legacy workflows when it really should be the other way around. But I think we’ve reached an inflection point where more TMCs are accepting that they have reached a ceiling with what they can do with their legacy technology.

To varying degrees, ideas that were once fringe are generating interest: like figuring out how to be more content source agnostic; placing GDSs as spokes and not hubs in the agency tech stack; employing a more sophisticated data structure than a flat file passenger name record; blaming the mid-office or back-office systems instead of the new functionality when the two can’t play nicely together; and being open to different, more modern workflows.

This is a big deal. I have long believed that one of the most understated truths in travel management is that most TMCs and online booking tools implicitly ask their clients to compromise. In order to get the savings, visibility, control, and all the other great company-level benefits of a managed travel program, a company’s travelers are expected to accept booking experiences with fewer options, less rich descriptive content and weaker servicing capabilities than that which is offered by the airlines’ sites and apps.

This is the case because for so long so much of our industry has insisted that unless we can find a way to plug whatever new comes along into our 1990s' tech stacks and 1980s' processes, we’re not interested – travelers and companies be damned.

TMCs have gotten away with that mindset for a while, but the world is different now. The airline product has gotten richer and more complicated, and companies have rightly gotten more concerned about traveler well-being. For the next generation of travelers and travel managers, compromise on the booking experience will be a non-starter. I truly believe that TMCs face a stark choice right now: Close the content gap between supplier direct and the online booking tool, or get out of the booking business altogether. NDC, warts and all, is our last, best hope for accomplishing that.

And so here we find ourselves in an unexpected place. Thanks to American’s actions, more progress has been made by TMCs, GDSs and other industry players in the last quarter, albeit grudgingly in some cases, than in any other quarter I can remember. Eventually that will translate into better experiences for travelers and their companies.

Although its recent deeds and actions have left many wondering if American Airlines is trying to kill third-party distribution, it is the ultimate of ironies that its NDC strategy might just be what saves it.