It's been a year since Siemens and Volkswagen signed direct connect deals with Lufthansa. The agreements made sense considering the companies' shared home market and the amount of spend with the German airline group. This was followed by another announcement in April 2017 when UK TMCs Clarity and Click Travel implemented direct connect solutions and in May HRG showed its enthusiasm for direct connect in its financial results, having now signed a NDC-related agreement with BA and Iberia.
It took nine months from initial talks to launch for Clarity and Click to start using Lufthansa's direct connect, so if other talks with TMCs have been positive we could see some more announcements soon.
At Business Travel Summit Amsterdam last week, Michael Gloor, senior director sales France and Benelux at Lufthansa provided an update on which European countries have been the most interested in the offering.
Belgium, he claims, is the "role model as most local players are connected" and it has "the most share of direct connect in Europe."
Discussions in France are "good", while in Luxembourg, Gloor says there is "no real interest because the fee is not a big deal." There has not been much activity in the Netherlands.
Gloor added that the initiative is "heading into a good direction on digitalisation and personalisation" with an aim to offer differentiated contracts for travel buyers, although not all fare components are currently aligned across all the airlines in the group.
But there is still scepticism, with some buyers and TMCs unsure about the transparency of the direct connects, despite claims from airlines.
On the same panel business travel expert Marijke Poppink said: "My concern [with NDC] was the shopping experience and whether it can integrate with OBTs. My feeling is that it's more about commercials than display; the GDS only shows a small part of what's on offer so I understand the strategy but I'm not yet convinced on how it's done."
Adam Knights, managing director, UK at ATPI added "GDS has embraced this new technology too late but caught up. We want to offer the content so we're optimistic we'll have that, but I'm not sure airlines will give all the content and not just keep it to themselves."
The distribution landscape has continued to shift with BA introducing a fee and 33 airlines now NDC Level 3 certified. Gloor has heard rumours that other airlines are looking at the technical and commercial approach to distribution, so this topic isn't something that's going away any time soon.