Last week Travelport claimed it is the first GDS company to manage a live NDC booking.
The booking was for a business passenger travelling between London and Milan on an unnamed European carrier. It was an offline booking made by UK agency Meon Valley Travel and only included a seat, no ancillaries.
While some are hailing the news as a 'landmark moment' the GDS's global head of new distribution and marketing Ian Heywood reminded those at IATA's Airline Industry Retailing Symposium (AIRS) last week that it will still take some time for NDC to reach scale.
On IATA's goal of 20% of content coming through NDC from 20 airlines by 2020, Heywood said "a lot needs to take place" by then. This was echoed by Kathy Morgan, VP NDC at Sabre who believes the 'work, shop, pay' elements are in place but handling complexities such as voluntary or involuntary changes are yet to be ironed out. Both Morgan and Heywood stressed that a large number of bookings will continue to be outside of the NDC channel for some time yet and will be managed as they always have been.
There are other players in the market. Travel content aggregator Travelfusion is working with 30 agencies and 32 carriers on NDC. CEO Moshe Rafiah says its numbers are "tiny" but the growth is driving endorsements and adoption among travel agencies. In the last six weeks it has processed 30,000 PNRs (passenger name records) with a 30% increase every month in the last 2-3 months.
Scale does not just rely on technology infrastructure but is also largely dependent on improving response rates and efficient workflows that work for both agents and airlines; Heywood says carriers had been building processes without realising agency workflows vary. It makes a difference when each understands when ancillaries are presented to the traveller or when payment is taken, for example.
Some are now working closer across the chain to get NDC to work; CTM and Qantas are one example. "We sit in each other's offices and look at our workflows, and also create new ones so the teams can really roll up their sleeves and make efficiencies," said Laura Ruffles, CEO Australia & New Zealand of CTM.
Alongside those processes being figured out all three GDSes are busy building their NDC APIs with pilots or launches planned in the first quarter of 2019. The question then will be how agencies and airlines plan to use it.