The promise of New Distribution Capability was to revolutionize airline booking by streamlining the travel experience, but in practice, its impact during irregular operations (IROPs) reveals a more complicated reality.
While NDC was heralded as a game-changer for business travel – designed to enhance shopping and booking air – flight disruptions, such as delays, rerouted itineraries and unused tickets, have resulted in persistent challenges. Not all carriers have fully adopted the technology and many airlines still post fares outside NDC, leaving gaps in content and complicating interline and codeshare arrangements.
For business travelers and corporate travel managers, resolving issues during irregular operations has become more complex, exposing the limitations of NDC’s promise to deliver seamless, end-to-end solutions.
Francesco Deluca, regional director EMEA for Omega World Travel, a GlobalStar travel management partner and shareholder, notes that in the context of NDC-booked travel using an aggregator (non-GDS), there is a requirement to interrogate the system booking origin as well as GDS booked travel when attempting to pre-empt/pre-warn travelers who may be affected by IROPs.
“Functionality differs from airline to airline – some only have limited functionality in terms of the changes that can be made without having to call them,” Deluca says. “We often face instances where necessary changes can’t be made without the need to call the airlines in question. Some have their own helplines which are dedicated to NDC bookings, but there are also airlines that do not have these. In either instance it can ultimately mean more time taken to overcome the issue.”
Nicola Ping, global manager of travel distribution for Flight Centre Travel Group, notes carriers that have embraced order management are generally much better equipped to handle IROPs.
“And in these cases, regardless of whether the booking is serviced by a TMC, the airline’s app, or directly at the airport, we can still access the booking seamlessly and manage disruptions without downstream impacts,” she says. In contrast, airlines still relying on traditional distribution channels often require manual intervention during IROPs.
“While we can still support the traveler, the process is less efficient and can take more time, impacting the overall experience,” Ping notes. “There’s tremendous potential to improve the customer experience by modernizing these systems, which is why we’re actively encouraging more airlines to adopt newer, order-based models.”
Jay Richmond, vice president, solutions consulting at Amadeus, notes a major challenge is that there is not really one standard. “Inconsistent adoption and different interpretations of the NDC standard coupled with the use of different versions of the standard by airlines have resulted in a highly complex landscape,” Richmond says. “At Amadeus, we take normalization very seriously, and invest significant time, resources and technological power to normalize NDC data for our customers via the Amadeus Travel Platform.”
Richmond maintains the industry will be living in a hybrid world for quite some time where EDIFACT and NDC will coexist. It is therefore very important that travel management solutions can handle both technologies in parallel and ideally in a seamless, non-disruptive way. “However, we do expect that as technical standardization evolves and innovation accelerates, the transaction volumes will shift increasingly towards NDC,” he says.
Still, many see great promise in what’s ahead. Charlie Sultan, president of Concur Travel at SAP Concur, views NDC as the future of modern, standardized air travel and notes that the progress made in the past few years is significant.
“While there’s still work to do, especially around disruption handling and interline servicing, the industry is moving from decades of patching legacy systems to building smarter, digital-first solutions,” he says. “With continued collaboration between airlines, TMCs and technology providers, we can ensure adoption is not only smooth but also delivers long-term value. NDC opens the door to more personalized offers, richer content and faster servicing, ultimately benefiting both travelers and the organizations supporting them.”
In Practice
Alice Ferrari, CEO of Kyte, an API technology platform for airline retailing, says when NDC first started, the airlines and travel agencies were “sold a dream” that NDC would be able to elevate the commercial proposition of an airline by bringing more options and more flexibility when booking through a third party.
“One of the other things was airlines wanted to make the direct channel being the website or mobile app on par completely with third parties,” Ferrari says. “In reality, that’s not the same, and still today, you see some real discrepancies between NDC and whatever a travel agency consumes and the website.”
The root cause comes down to three factors: Not everyone has integrated NDC at the same level, NDC is quite complex, and the adoption of all the functionality may not be there. “I’m skeptical because the vision that has been set out has not been delivered,” Ferrari says. “NDCs aren’t really doing anything that GDSs can’t already do. After 10 years, NDCs are just catching up to the core functionality of the GDSs and has given leverage to the bigger airlines to renegotiate their contracts with the GDSs.”
That said, she does believe NDC has tremendous potential.
Puck Voorneveld, senior director distribution and payment transformation for Lufthansa Group, notes that the first years of the NDC journey at the airline evolved around optimizing the shopping experience, and building bridging solutions and support tools with many of its travel agency partners for servicing in case of IROPs.
“In the last two years we have heavily invested in the end-to-end NDC experience, mainly focusing on servicing,” she says. “The aim was to minimize any manual intervention or separate tool usage that has caused friction and potentially larger handling times than before for our travel agency partners, and to provide servicing automation directly within the NDC API, such as direct notifications (Order Change Notifications, or OCN), among others.
Itinerary Changes and Disruptions
Under NDC, itinerary changes don’t always follow the same rules, leaving buyers and TMCs to rethink their processes. That’s why it’s vital for airlines to communicate which content is actually NDC versus EDIFACT, and how that impacts the ability to rebook disrupted travel.
However, communication varies by airline. Some work very closely with customers and technology partners to clearly show which content is NDC and which is EDIFACT, while others are still refining that process. Clear identification is especially useful during rebooking, as it speeds up the resolution of disruptions.
Ping notes that while airline communication around whether content is NDC or EDIFACT is still inconsistent, what’s more critical than labeling the content type is ensuring fare rules and restrictions are communicated clearly, accurately and consistently upfront.
“In general, NDC channels actually provide more content than EDIFACT, so when the original booking is made through NDC, it typically allows for a broader range of options during a reshop – whether voluntary or involuntary,” she says. “Sticking with the NDC channel in these cases tends to preserve access to the most available content.”
With traditional EDIFACT bookings, agents are accustomed to managing disruptions directly through the GDS. With NDC, there can be instances now where agents need to call the airline to rebook tickets. The main difference is that NDC implementations vary by airline, so IROP handling isn’t yet fully standardized.
“Encouragingly, we’re seeing a positive shift. As more airlines fully transition to NDC, the distinction between EDIFACT and NDC will matter less, ultimately making rebooking processes more consistent,” Sultan says.
“The good news is that most airlines have now built key servicing features into their NDC programs and these are improving quickly,” he explains. “For example, NDC airlines use Order Change Notification to share updates on schedule changes or cancellations. When TMC tools integrate well with each airline’s OCN process, agents can access a more seamless, omnichannel view of what’s happening across carriers. Strong online booking tools are already making this much smoother, pulling all the data into one place to help minimize disruption for travelers.”
According to Voorneveld, Lufthansa Group has made it a key priority to support travel agencies during IROPs by offering training on tools as well as training 600 internal servicing agents. “After investing over €10 million in the last two years on servicing improvements, this May we went live with our enhanced involuntary servicing capabilities in NDC version 24.1,” Voorneveld says. When disruptions occur, Lufthansa Group uses the NDC API. In the event a partner has not yet certified servicing in NDC 24.1, any involuntary change can be handled by the company’s servicing tool, SPRK agent portal. In addition, global B2B agency support is available to handle disruptions.
As airline commercial relationships get more complicated, IROPs can muddy the NDC waters further. For example, interline and codeshare journeys work more seamlessly in traditional GDS bookings right now, where changes flow across the full itinerary. With NDC, these segments are often handled separately, which means travelers might receive multiple Order Change Notifications for the same journey.
“While this can create extra coordination today, industry collaboration is already underway to extend NDC servicing for interline and codeshare flights,” Sultan says. “Once this is in place, the same digital-first benefits we’re seeing on direct flights will extend across complex itineraries too, improving the disruption management experience for both agents and travelers.”
Unused Tickets
One of the biggest pain points under NDC comes when trips don’t go as planned, raising new complications around unused tickets and itinerary changes. “This is one of the areas of NDC still maturing, but the industry is moving in the right direction,” Sultan says.
“At SAP Concur, we’re actively collaborating with airline partners to make unused ticket visibility and exchanges just as straightforward, if not more so, than in the past,” he notes. “As these capabilities evolve, travelers will benefit from faster processing and easier itinerary changes. Some airlines are even discussing the inclusion of more indicators than in traditional EDIFACT to show if the passenger has boarded the flight, flown the flight or if the ticket is unused.”
In instances where NDC has been sourced through a non-GDS aggregator, Omega receives e-mails notifying them of such changes and any GDS content (NDC or EDIFACT) is communicated via the GDS.
“The policy at Lufthansa Group is that fully unused tickets can be refunded according to fare rules – API based, no SPRK needed here,” Voorneveld says. “Hence, we do not run into issues with unused tickets.”
For ticket and itinerary changes, each airline’s implementation of unused tickets is according to its own strategy, Richmond says. “In our role as an enabler of the marketplace, we are committed to normalizing and harmonizing the different airline implementations,” he explains.
Pace of NDC Adoption
Many in the industry do not feel the current uptake of NDC across global carriers is fast enough to ensure a seamless experience during disruptions. “Speaking as an employee of a business travel management company, NDC adoption does not offer a seamless experience right now,” Deluca says. “Airlines are working at their own pace and with their own objectives which appear to favor their direct B2C stream. There is a low degree of uniformity requiring a BTC to seek out more solutions to ensure we are meeting our clients’ basic requirements.”
With that in mind, he says he would like to see more technical improvements to enable more changes to be made that do not require contacting the carrier.
Richmond shares there is a robust pipeline of airline agreements to distribute NDC content through the Amadeus Travel Platform, with more than 70 airline NDC agreements signed and 35 airlines already implemented. Additionally, a large part of its travel agency base has access to, and can service, NDC content available through the platform.
“The overall adoption pace of NDC on our platform will progress gradually, and as the NDC standard matures and more servicing capabilities are deployed, we observe a notable increase in adoption from the corporate sector, that recognizes the benefits NDC can bring, such as dynamic offers and pricing, and richer content,” he says. “Ensuring seamless end-to-end compatibility throughout the entire booking and servicing flows is essential to unlock the full potential of NDC for all stakeholders, thus enabling NDC adoption at scale.”
