The Buyer Journey: NDC Upends Programs, Still Holds Promise
By Donna M. Airoldi
We are nearly 18 months removed from when American Airlines made its December 2022 announcement that in April 2023 it would begin to pull content from EDIFACT and offer it only in direct or New Distribution Capability-enabled channels. We also are into the second year since American made good on that promise.
United Airlines soon thereafter pulled some content from EDIFACT, as well, and expanded the number of fares it continuously prices, which NDC makes possible. Delta in April announced that it, too, would be introducing NDC by the end of this year or beginning of next, at least in a testing environment. There's no doubt the industry is in a transformative state.
BTN spoke with travel buyers and consultants about how American's move has affected corporate travel, where travel managers are on their journey to modern retailing, and where we might be headed with NDC or what might be next after it. The responses below have been edited for clarity.
BTN: Did American Airlines' 2023 NDC move kickstart anything, either for your company's travel program or for the industry?
Rita Visser
Karoline Mayr
Kim Hamer
Rita Visser, director of global travel sourcing & GPO, Oracle:
We turned on NDC content last April through Sabre Red 360 and not just for American. Weirdly, the first NDC ticket that we issued was for United. It changed our program. We had to be much more collaborative—with our booking tool and with our agency, even down to our [global distribution system] levels. We bring issues to them. I think it forced collaboration on their side, so I see that as a good. … We looked at and said we can't put our travelers in a position to question the integrity of what we bring to them, so that's why we turned it on.
Karoline Mayr, director, global travel, Brink’s
It kickstarted employees asking why they couldn't find the airfare they were seeing on American's website because most people look online at their favorite airline then go into Concur or whatever online booking tool to book it. They're like, 'Oh, wait a second, this isn't right.' They were wondering why we are selling these higher fares, and it immediately caused an issue for us and for the [travel management company]. … I'm trying to get the content. We're looking for a tool with direct connect to bring it in.
Kim Hamer, partner, Results Plus Consulting
American drew a line in the sand. Instead of talking and talking like we've been doing for more than a decade, they finally said it's time to take some action. Now, people will say the way that they went about it was probably tough to deal with. But, I do think at least in the U.S., it really forced the hands in the ecosystem to say it's time for change. You're still seeing some of the fallout. That said, you're starting to see more of an evolution now, which is definitely needed in our industry.
BTN: At What stage are you in terms of turning on NDC booking?
Steven Mandelbaum, SVP of business solutions, EAB:
We have it turned on with American. We've asked for it to be turned on for United. American's move in April 2023 is what caused us to turn it on. For years, we wanted to do it, but the value proposition wasn't there, and we struggled with this over time. American has done an incredible job getting the technology to a level it wasn't at one to two years ago. People have talked about the promise for years, but now the capabilities have started to mature. We pursued this earnestly in the last couple of months, and I think American's push definitely pushed the industry forward.
Dorian Stonie, senior director global travel, Salesforce:
We've had modern retailing in one form or another for the last two, three years. First our travelers were booking directly with American, Delta and United through our Concur TripLink connection. Last year, we were the first United pilot customer. We were the first American Express Global Business Travel customer to pilot NDC fares on our offline transactions in the U.S. In September, we moved all our offline American bookings to NDC. Since Nov. 28, we've been rolling out Concur T2, and that's going to lay the foundation for us to activate NDC with both United and American in the U.S. on Sabre to our online booking community. We're looking to activate [those] online transactions by the end of this coming quarter.
Rebecca Jeffries, travel services manager, Toyota Motor North America:
We have it turned on for our offline American reservations and all [those] are going on NDC, unless of course EDIFACT is less expensive. … I'm anxious and champing at the bit to get it turned on in my booking tool, but it's been a slow haul to get there. [Deem] is releasing the new platform tonight [April 24], but we're not going live with it until May 8. We cannot turn NDC on because Deem built it for basically instant purchase without hold. When you hit submit, it's not going through filing finishing [or] to the agency for file. And it has to go through the agency for file finishing for all kinds of reasons that have to do with our reporting and quality controls. And that piece was further down on their roadmap. My agency, thank goodness, had conversations with Deem and said, 'Wait, whoa, there's this really critical missing piece.' So Deem is having a lot of internal discussions trying to figure out how quickly they can move that up on the timeline. … That's our dilemma right now. I need my reporting.
Suzanne Boyan, travel and meetings manager, ZS Associates
We still haven't pulled the trigger with American, and the reason why, at least through our TMC and through our OBT, if we do a roundtrip ticket with American NDC, it comes as two separate itineraries—one for your first leg and one for your second leg. We felt like that was a really terrible user experience. NDC in general is a terrible user experience, but to make it even worse is not worth the pain. What we've said, which is frustrating, is just go book it. Make sure you book it on a dot-com [as opposed to a metasearch or aggregator], and make sure you utilize your ZS email, so we get the data from Traxo. We've flat out told American, we really need you to partner with Traverse so that we can get this data back because your NDC connections through Zeno and Frosch are not great. They're talking with Traverse. They're moving along slowly but steadily to get to that end state, which is good. This is a big change for even American, who's probably been thinking about this for a long time. But if they hadn't kickstarted it, it never would have happened and no one in the industry would have been better.
Steven Mandelbaum
Dorian Stonie
Rebecca Jeffries
Suzanne Boyan
BTN: But you've turned it on for United. How is that experience?
Suzanne Boyan
Karoline Mayr
Boyan:
It's mostly cons, to be totally honest, at least on our side. Look, it makes us a stronger partner with United, but I don't think our TMC or our OBT was ready to ingest that data. It's clunky, and the agents don't really know what to do with it. It's a frustrating experience all around.
Karoline Mayr:
Right now, we have a lot of leakage because of the American Airlines [price discrepancy] issue. If you lose faith in the tool, you probably are not going to book your hotel and car and other things too. … As an employee, they're probably like, they just went and just booked it themselves. I completely understand that. So we need to make sure we're offering the tools that they can use to do their job
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