I wasn’t always an NDC hater. I supported NDC. At the 2024 Travellers Choice Conference, I told fellow travel agents NDC was here to stay and the sooner we learnt to work with it, the better.
My experience up to that point was positive. A few quirks yes, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted. Perhaps the aviation gods had simply been smiling on me.
However, I’ve since learnt how quickly that luck runs out. NDC has enormous potential. But the way airlines have implemented, restricted and inadequately supported it is a problem.
Most airlines are using it as a commercial barrier
NDC is no longer a side project. Airlines will keep moving more services across to NDC, whether agents like the system or not.
This is for one key reason: it’s cheaper for the airlines at the expense of travel agents.
Access is essential, not optional. I recently reviewed the NDC programs available to our agency through Sabre: 25 distribution programs covering 32 airlines. (Ben Apsey, left).
Of those 32, only six currently allow both IATA and TIDS agencies into their Aussie NDC content. The other 26 (approx. 81%) exclude TIDS agencies from their NDC fares and servicing altogether.
Our agency cannot access a long list of carriers for our clients. One reason: we operate under TIDS rather than full IATA ticketing accreditation.
This is despite being ATIA accredited, a member of Travellers Choice and connected to airlines through both Sabre and AirTickets.
We’re apparently good enough to sell these airlines’ seats but not to access more favourable NDC fares.
Six airlines have already proven TIDS participation works. IATA itself settled the identification question back in 2018, when its own distribution management group endorsed TIDS as the industry-wide way to identify non-IATA-accredited agents.
The barrier some airlines maintain today isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a choice. It is simply a money grab.
NDC is poorly serviced
Access is only half the problem. Even airlines I’d call good NDC operators fall apart the moment a booking needs servicing.
Two NDC servicing issues capture the problem.
In my own case, a straightforward schedule change dragged on for two weeks. This included being yelled at and argued with while trying to resolve it, then passed between departments that seemed more interested in redirecting the problem than taking ownership.
By the end of it, I blew up too. I am not proud of that, but two weeks of who knows how many AI chat bots, supervisors, reps and BDM’s plus numerous circular conversations will test anyone.
One of my Toowoomba staff faced a similar issue. She has the patience of a saint and is genuinely one of the loveliest people you could meet, so none of us can imagine she did anything to warrant being spoken to aggressively while simply trying to help a client.
These are not examples of airlines meeting basic customer expectations. They are examples of chronic under-investment in customer service, demonstrated by a system with unclear ownership, inconsistent training and support structures.
Airport and reservations staff are familiar with traditional EDIFACT tickets that have existed for decades. However, they are untrained in NDC.
Those individuals can only work with the training and authority they’ve been given. The implementation has not prepared the people meant to support it and help customers.
Airlines have spent years offshoring reservations and customer service work to places like The Philippines, India and South Africa. Cheaper labour is not inherently the problem.
But when an offshore person answering the query is working from a script, on a fraction of an Australian wage, with limited authority or accountability to actually fix anything, it is not hard to see why so many calls end up going in circles.
Technology should deliver a better customer experience, not make people feel like they’ve hit their head against a brick wall, for even the simplest tasks.
The result disadvantages agencies and consumers
This isn’t a niche gripe for travel agents. Airlines increasingly use NDC to distribute fares and offers that don’t exist through traditional channels.
For consumers, the effect is invisible until it isn’t. A client can only compare a price and isn’t able to assess the service quality. That’s not a transparent market.
There is no evidence to suggest any airlines have coordinated their policies. But whether the exclusion is collective or independent, the effect is identical. Excluding non-IATA agencies’ ability to access NDC reduces our ability to compete.
TIDS agencies use a consolidator because it’s the right commercial structure for them.
The agency gives customers the advice, compares the options and fixes problems when something goes wrong and does it without the ability to charge the airline for doing so. The distribution technology makes no material difference to consumers.
The airlines clear preference for NDC creates two unequal classes of agency.
To effectively compete with airlines, agencies (i.e. small businesses) need to take on additional yearly costs of full IATA accreditation and the financial exposure that brings, to have full NDC access. Or stay locked out of a growing part of distribution and fare content. That’s not meaningful choice.
Airlines can’t have it both ways
The commercial incentive to airlines means NDC adoption will keep growing. Airlines and IATA need to explain why TIDS agencies are excluded, how that’s meant to benefit consumers and why solutions other carriers already use can’t be adopted more widely.
Airlines can’t insist NDC is the future while locking most agencies out of it and expecting the rest to navigate a sub-par support system.
ATIA, agency networks, GDS providers, airlines and government representatives all have a stake in treating this as both a market-access issue and a consumer-servicing issue.
I believe in NDC’s potential, but technology alone doesn’t modernise an industry. Fair access and better service does.
Until airlines recognise that, NDC won’t be remembered as the technology that transformed airline retailing.
It will be remembered as the technology that forgot its purpose, servicing customers.
