Crossing the barrier- How to thrive in a changing world

John: Today is the slowest pace of change we will all experience for the rest of our lives. That really resonates with me because I had to change how I thought about NDC at least three or four times while preparing for this conversation because things are changing so fast. And I think even our panelists would have to agree that they've probably had to evolve their understanding of where NDC sits in the future based on that.  

For more than a decade, NDC has been positioned as the foundation of modern airline retailing, and to its credit, it has driven progress. Airlines have more control over their offers, more personalized products are reaching the market, and we started to move beyond legacy constraints.  

But if we're being honest, we're also beginning to see some cracks. We have fragmentation across implementations, ongoing challenges with servicing and scale, and an industry that is still dependent on legacy systems behind the scenes. At the same time, airlines are beginning to accelerate their investment and offers and orders, and now with AI entering the picture, we're potentially looking at a world where agents are the consumer, not humans, and they're interacting directly with airline systems, raising new questions about scale. Is NDC still relevant? Have we been building towards the right architecture with NDC, or are we now trying to force the solution that doesn't fully solve the problem? If that's the case, what needs to fundamentally change to avoid the same challenges at just a larger scale?  

With me today, I have an excellent panel to help us address these questions. I think it's going to be a very open and honest discussion. So let's get started with introductions. Let's start with you, Jim, at the end.  

Jim: All right, Jim Davidson, I'm what am I now? I'm on the board of Accelya. You many of you probably know me from my Farelogix days and done a lot of work with NDC.  

Nikki: Hi, I'm Nikki Ping. I look after corporate online distribution for Flight Center Travel Group.  

Jost: Hi, I'm Jost Daft from Lufthansa Group. I started roughly 10 years ago with this transformation with the infancy of NDC at the beginning and now being responsible for transformation to new order management world.  

Kathy: Kathy Morgan with Sabre. I lead one of our product management areas. I've had the joy of our NDC program from its beginning, so lots to talk about there.  

John: Good. Housekeeping item if you would like to submit a question during the session, we're going to save some time at the end to answer some of your questions. Make sure you're logged into the app. Select this session from the agenda in the app, tap the icon to ask a question and you'll see that you can submit a question there. We'll try to get to as many of those as we can near the end.  

So let's just cut right to it. Is NDC still relevant, Kathy?  

Kathy: Yeah. So it's absolutely relevant, but I want to put NDC maybe in a different context, not so much the technical component of NDC, but the principles of NDC, which is really the foundation of modern retailing. So I think if you if you anchor on that tenet, then the relevancy I think is more obvious than ever. But there's a lot we got to do with it.  

Jim: Jim.  

Jim: Well, yeah, I agree with that. I agree. I think the relevancy is now actually proven out in the data. And I know this conference is about data. We're seeing about on average for every NDC booking, we're seeing an average of between 7 and 16 dollars for merchandising or retailing. That's extremely profitable revenue for the airline and for corporations. The other thing is I just saw a survey that was surveying corporate travel managers and the question was will NDC be part of their program? And 90% of them said within three years that they believe they'll be all NDC. Now I think that's a little aggressive. But again, I think those are the kind of the title wins that are finally getting to where we are. So we're, yeah, we still have some challenges servicing and technology, but now I think it's very relevant.  

John: Yeah, Nikki, would you like to?  

Nikki: Yes. So I agree with Jim and I think that if I think about our corporate customer base when they're either looking for a new TMC or validating their, their choice of TMC, it is unheard of now to have an RFP that does not include content or NDC as at least part of the questions. I think, yeah, all of them expecting to do it in the next three years. There's some parts of the world which haven't really started on an NDC journey, so that might be a bit optimistic, but it's definitely still a very relevant part of any travel program.  

John: An interesting question, did we start in the right place with NDC? Have we spent the last decade investing in NDC when maybe we should have started with offers and orders rather than NDC? Jost, Lufthansa has certainly been early into NDC.  

Jost: Yeah, totally. That's a tough question. And technically I like to prefer better to look into the future than looking back what happened years ago or even a decade ago. So we should even discuss whether it should call the new distribution capability of the more than 10 years that we were working on this one.  

The question was it the right starting point? I would say considering where we were back in time, I would say absolutely yes. You need to start somewhere. There was a lot about the move abilities in the sales channel. So I would say it was a right starting point given the complexity behind the system, the back end systems we have. I have seen not a single airline or an IT provider being ready more than 10 years ago to tackle already the order piece. So I would say if you need to start somewhere, you need to make it into a digestible pieces. I think it was a right starting point focusing on shopping because it's worth providing a tangible promise for the decision makers also to start this transformation.  

John: Yeah.  

Nikki: I think that we've probably learned a lot. as we've gone along the way because if you look at it purely from a technical perspective, I think now a lot of airlines are seeing NDC offers being part of their kind of core offering. But sometimes they're still struggling to actually be as creative as they would like to be because they're still constrained by the constraints of a PNR or a ticket. But if you'd said to somebody back in 2016, we're going to do all of this with NDC, but first we need to get rid of the PNRs and tickets, I think people would have just not been able to get their head round it. You have to kind of do something that people understand first and it's also generated, like you say, a good return on investment for the airlines. So you had to almost do that in order to get people's head around the idea of moving to orders.  

Kathy: I probably have a maybe a slightly alternate view, which is I think if you could go in the go-back machine you might. For those of you that were around in the early days, you remember there was level 1, level 2, Level 3 NDC. Level 1 was about shopping. Get shopping right. Leverage legacy rails for the subsequent processing and then you progress from there. I think what we underestimated as an industry was the complexity of the handoff and the fact that there was so much modernization across the entire ecosystem for the order management piece to be able to advance that we've lost sight. We lost some of the time to value. So I think if I could go back, I would say we should really because the ROI early days is in the offer, it's your retelling point.  

So I think if we could, knowing what we know now, you might go back. I don't think you necessarily get to a different destination, but I think you would potentially slice it in a way that you unlock value sooner, that you ease the friction that had that was created across the ecosystem and you allow the value equation to lead the decisions of what you're doing.  

John: So let's bring that forward to today if there is an airline out here that has not invested in NDC or offer and order yet. Jim, where do you start?  

Jim: Well, again, I think the key is you start and this is a question I've thought about for years. Should we, was NDC the cart before the horse? And the reality is we had to start. And so whether we'd have started with modern airline retailing or offers and orders, I think we'd have had a lot of pain regardless. And so I think the key is you learn when you start. And if you haven't started yet, frankly, whether you're looking at jumping into offers and orders or jumping into NDC, you're kind at the same point, you have to start. So I know we caused a lot of pain for poor Jost over there when we were working, they were one of the first ones but we learned a lot and look where we got to. So you're going to go through some pain.  

Now, the good news is there's been tons of lessons learned. So if you're starting now, you don't have to necessarily go through that, but the key is to start. And so whether, I can't answer that because I struggle with it, but I think starting is the key.  

John: Any other opinions or?  

Nikki: Start somewhere is a good idea.  

John: Start somewhere soon.  

Nikki: Yeah.  

John: Perfect, Perfect. Is NDC still a technology problem or is it now more of a commercial problem? Jim, you wrote a LinkedIn article not too long ago discussing the things an airline needs to consider as part of their NDC journey and where they find pitfalls.  

Jim: Yeah.  

John: Is it still a technology problem?  

Well, you know, there is certainly some technology in terms of, really the technology is you're trying to take some fairly new technology and integrate it into some fairly traditional technology. I don't care what, banking industry. I was telling some of the other day if Amazon was starting with the airline industry, it wouldn't be here today. It just would have never gotten off the ground because they started new. It was a new concept. They didn't actually have to hook to a lot of legacy technology until later on.  

So I wrote that about the top 10 reasons why they fail. Three of them were really technology related. The biggest ones were strategy and not having the resources and the vision. There's still some technology around our standardization that I think will get sorted out over the next several years. But I don't think it's a tech problem anymore. I think it's a just a pull up your sleeves and get it done.  

John: Nikki, from your perspective? Tech or commercial?  

Nikki: So I agree that the tech has evolved a lot and it's almost where it needs to be, but the commercial. I guess there's two ways to answer the question because we just said to an airline, if you haven't started start somewhere. Well, the starting is not free, so the commercial has got to be a consideration for the airline. Can I afford to transform my whole tech stack to be ready for offers and orders? That's not something that comes cheap. But I guess the real thing that everyone's really meaning by is it commercial is, we heard originally with NDC that airlines wanted to be able to control their own destiny and not rely on third-party distribution. I think that commercial is gone because actually if you look at most of the big airlines, most of the technology is available through most of the channels now. So that whole commercial issue I think has gone away, but it's still very expensive to transform an airline as you all know.  

John: Yeah, Jost as an early adopter of NDC and an airline with a great deal of NDC penetration, are your remaining barriers technical or commercial at this point?  

Jost: Oh, that's an excellent question. So from my perspective, we've seen some waves. So at the beginning, exactly as I said was a very commercial question, strategy. How do you set up your channels? How do you want to move forward, having a key view on what is the benefit of NDC?  

And then we at some point we were heavily looking into technology. Right now we see if you broaden not only to NDC but the full picture of modern airline retailing, you see that it's a lot about process change, it's a lot of mindset change, and also technology. So we still see that in this area. So need to invest heavily. Also technology wise, it gives you some examples of major blocks that we still need to look into what they call it NDCU or the big picture of modern airline retailing.  

First, for example, is interline. Everyone is still looking for getting the right schemers for interline. It's a technology question. There's a lot of data concept questions behind who owns orders, how do you interact with partners? It's becoming a more relevant question also for joint ventures. So we always looked into the, call it classical interline, but it's more and more a question of how do you deal in closer relationships and joint ventures.  

Second big building block that we look into is the architecture. So we have a very ratified reference architecture right now, but now we need to dig deeper how also sub domains are connected to each other. For example, how is the product talking to an order management system? How is the stock keeper connected in there?  

And third, one of the very important building blocks, which is for me heavily technology infused this, how do you bridge old and new world? Because we need to build adapters between old and new world. And this is for me is heavily technology driven.  

And so therefore I would say commercials are always around there. But also we need to still do a lot of transformation on the technology side, yes.  

Kathy: Yeah, I definitely, I think commercials were a lot more of a problem in the early days because there was a lot of conflation of technical and commercial strategy that prevented progress. But sitting where I sit now, I think a lot of that has been sorted. I actually think we're still having, we're at a different point in time where technology becomes even more problematic, which is a physics problem.

For those of you that go could go back to the early days of IATA. I was talking to a guy last night about when Claude put the reference architecture. I don't know if y'all remember that. And it was this clean interface into the world of airlines. And then if any of y'all have ever saw John Madden on the whiteboard back in the day and this guy gets this, He runs this in the air. And all of a sudden you realize if you just go back and look at that visual that that we were going to have a physics problem with the ability of systems to scale the level of interoperability that was going to be required from a technical perspective.  

But we've been pushing along and we've made a lot of progress. We're at this point now where this scale issue. It's not that it's technically impossible. It's super freaking expensive whenever you are looking at. We have a com within a Sabre environment in our marketplace. We process around a billion shops a day. At our peak, we're around 14,000 transactions per second. We still have conversations with airlines talking about 5 TPS and a 500 look-to-book ratio. You have to solve that scale issue. You have to take some of the principles that allowed us to scale marketplaces in the past and say how can those principles still be applied without compromising the intensive NDC which is around modern retailing, airline having more control.

So if we don't get intellectually honest that there is a physics issue with the way that the current implementations are working, I'm afraid we're going to be here five years from now still having a conversation.  

John: And so has NDC actually improved the economics of distribution or has it just shifted the cost into other places?  

Kathy: Yeah, I don't know, Maybe I'd ask an airline. I have a view on that, but I think it's potentially shifted, but I don't know. Jost, you probably have to live and breathe this every day. So NDC is not only about cost. I think we made this point very clear at the very beginning. So there were other strategic themes behind NDC. So enabling better shopping experience where the airline can control the shopping experience in a better way than we can do today. So there is a commercial aspect to all of this obviously, but this is only one of the drivers of NDC and modern airline retailing. So you always need to consider this one and not too much especially as we have evolved, we have it in production of roughly 10 years. So cost aspects, commercials are one of the things. But I'm totally convinced that the foundation that we have laid with NDC for modern retailing was way more important and is now opening the door for the real things that we promised actually 10 years ago. And as soon as we now also tackle the back end perspective that we can really leverage of what we have started 10 years ago.  

Jim: Yeah. And obviously we participate in that. Our experience is that the cost curve does this and then kind of as volume comes, it goes out, but the value curve does this. So it really is, I mean, you have to get over this without shooting yourself because it is an investment that an airline has to make.  

And then just I'm going to go back to that technology point as we tend to focus on the bad side of technology and there are issues out there with it, but I look at the things that FCM and Qantas did together. A lot of those were technology dreams five years ago that are now in progress today and making it much better than it was before. Lufthansa has done some amazing things that they would come to us and say, hey, can you do this? And we're like, we don't even know what that is. But, yeah, technically you can do it. And United's out there with omni channel servicing and that was a pipe dream three or four years ago. So the, the part of the technology is you kind of have to get through that hump, but then you actually use that technology as an asset. And I think that's really what some of the more mature airlines are figuring out is that they can really differentiate themselves and provide services to their customers with it. So it's a double-edged sword.  

Jost: Yeah.  

John: For each of you, what are the key things that you feel NDC has fixed in the industry and what are the key barriers that you think have to be addressed in order for NDC to be successful in the future?  

Kathy: And I think fixed, I'd say addressing still maybe not fixed, but addressing content disparity. I think that's been something that has we've struggled, especially if you think about the emergence of ancillaries back in the day where you have and even now some of the more sophisticated servicing use cases of you just couldn't, the technology prevented you from being able to implement some of these things. So I think the fact of having that more ubiquitous access to content, allowing an airline to truly be channel and different from a content perspective is massive.  

I think when we think about the things we have to address one I mentioned before scale so I won't kick that horse again, but it's also around just an acceptance or an awareness and acceptance to fix the gaps in servicing. I had a conversation with a large agency. It was probably mid February. We were coming off of a week of really bad disruption because of weather. And they said, oh, have you heard what NDC means now? I'm like, Oh no, because you know, there's all these good...he goes. It means Not During Chaos because everything fell apart on the really complicated involuntary servicing use cases and the demand it put on their call centers.  

And so this is where this collaboration, when you have a panel like this on the stage, this is who can fix it. And so the fact that we are focused on that, if we can close those last few paper cuts, I think it's going to be really significant.  

John: Jost, for Lufthansa, What has it fixed and what are the biggest barriers left?  

Jost: Now I would say NDC opened the door for a broader perspective of optimization. So even though there's not 100% dependency between both, I think it was a mental thing. Once we started intensively talking about NDC hand in hand, we also looked into how we can better optimize our prices and started implementing continuous pricing. I said it's not 100% tied to anything. You can also do it in other channels, but this was a starting point to look into those things. So this really fixed a lot internally moving the mindset of our RM organization more towards an offer organization and also adding the product piece to it. So right now they consider also the entire design of product and the product management as part of this, not just saying. I have a fixed product that I'm selling, the right to fly, but I have a lot of other dimensions that I can add to it as a real retailer.  

So this was really something where NDC really helped us. So it's more kind of a mental thing where NDC helped us. Where I say what is still missing, everyone knows about this. We were focusing on shopping at the beginning and we discussed already was it the right starting point or not. As much as I would have loved that ONE Order management would have been in place already 10 years ago, I think now at the time that we all need to invest also into order management, get this piece done because then we can fully leverage NDC. So I think we all achieved a lot already. Now we need to continue the journey and invest into the second piece of NDC, which is the fulfillment and order piece.  

John: And you see that as the biggest barrier.  

Jost: This is, I would say right now one of the biggest barriers that we see, yeah.  

Nikki: Yeah. Nikki?  

So for both answers actually it's around content. So I think the good thing that NDC has really enabled us to do is get access to all the content, including all the ancillaries, the complex servicing and things that sometimes you could have only done previously on an airline website. The number of conversations that I have with corporate buyers now whose travellers say I can see it cheaper online has massively dropped, which is good because not only does it give us more content to sell, but for things like duty of care, it keeps travellers inside their insurance program, which is a good thing.  

The trickiest bit is around when we think at some airlines who've done good things with omni channel servicing, trying to get a traveller's head around the fact that on some airlines who have moved to airline stock, omni channel servicing is great, but others where it still doesn't work, you can't do it. Trying to explain that to a traveller is just ridiculously complicated and you can't possibly expect them to understand it. So that's the pain point I still want to be able to have solved. I want omni channel servicing everywhere. So I really want that shift away from neutral stock because it does my head in.  

Jim: I agree. I agree. I'm with you on that one. So yeah, I think the biggest barrier is I think we talked about collaboration and I think one of the things that has changed, three of the four of us and we don't allow airlines in that group. That's otherwise we'd have you, Jost, you're such a great guy. But we have this NDC fast track and it's a collection of people, GDSs, TMCs, corporates, tech players. And what we're actually doing is, we're basically identifying the barriers. And it's a group. I've never seen such a hard working group in my life. We really solve things. So we identify and we solve them. And that's, you can argue that. Why did it take 15 years to get here? Well, it did. But that's really one of the things I think we're seeing some differences. People are willing to get in, roll up their sleeves, solve some issues and do this for the benefit of all of our customers. So that's happening now. I think that's a good thing.  

John: I think we'd be remiss if we didn't at least ask the question. What will be the impact of agentic AI on NDC? If we fast forward in our heads five years. That's a long time. How has in each of your all's opinions, how has agentic AI impacted the relevance and the use of NDC? And is NDC a part of that future or does it become less a part of the future because of agentic AI?  

Kathy: Yeah. I think we have to be open to first. I think anytime you use the words AI, you have to follow up with who knows, right? I mean, it's going so fast and the opportunities, we can't even wrap our mind around them. But if you think about some of the complexities that we've dealt with NDC version control and things,  what airlines core systems can enable through the NDC APIs, you could envision a world if you got to a place where we had some just more discipline in the standards that maybe you're not even interfacing with an NDC API anymore. Airlines are exposing an MCP server, you're connecting to an MCP server. I know within our own environment, we're leveraging AI for things around content source optimization. Where's the best place to go at the right moment? How do we manage various volume controls? When should we be hitting live shopping versus some kind of a repository of shopping? That's the sweet spot, like really obvious for AI. And then when you start extending that into the disruption at the end, we call it point of interaction, where consumers are meeting this content, man, I think it's going to be a completely different game. And so we've got to just normalize all those back end things so that it's really frictionless.

John:  Jost, has agentic AI influenced Lufthansa's NDC strategy at all?  

Jost: We are heavily looking into this one. We also from NDC perspective looking into this one, also from standard setting perspective. The question is, is this the end of industry standards? And going back to what I mentioned earlier and NDC, at least for us, opened a lot of doors from the mindset, how you approach things. And I think this explains well why NDC still has a role, because you should first get a very clear understanding of what are your processes, what you want to achieve. It's not so much about the technology. Once you have a very clear view of what are the things you want to do with your customer, what are the data that you want to have? What is the high level data structure that you have? Then you can think about the technology and then definitely I believe AI will help us here to accelerate things. But the idea, the foundations of NDC will help us to do this in a clean approach and not in a chaotic approach. So AI will have a big impact. First, think about the foundations of what you actually want to achieve in this arena.  

John: Thank you.  

Kathy: Well, in a kind of a corporate travel world, where we've really already seen some of the benefits of AI is actually in the servicing of existing bookings. So if you've already got a booking and you decide you want to change the day where you already know the airline you've selected, actually it's quite easy to integrate AI into that and say I need to change my booking from Tuesday to Wednesday.  

The bit that I think is really complicated is the shopping. Because if you're a corporate traveller, and you say I've got a meeting in New York on Tuesday, how can I get there? Understanding which airlines fly, the schedule that's going to meet you, the prices, the policy, what I can and can't do with every offer. That still requires a huge amount of aggregation. And if you've got every airline going back 10 years doing something completely different, then AI is going to have a lot more computing power to understand what the options are. So I think that we've seen it's much easier to get AI involved in the servicing at the moment than it is in the shopping experience. But it definitely is moving very, very quickly.  

John: That's an interesting take, that AI would maybe grease the skids a little bit for solving the servicing problem more than the offer.  

Nikki: Yeah.  

Jim: Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's going to be some value and you know, when there's disruptions, I think there's processing that takes place. But I'll go back to what Kathy said. We're all, Kathy, and we're processing billions of offers every day. 90 what 98% of those are thrown out. So, and, and those other billions, 98% of those billion offers are not free. You look at, I won't speak for Sabre, but our AWS costs are probably the second highest cost outside of people. And that's because we are processing these. So I think that's where the AI can help us get smarter. And it's just going to take some time to have that learning around we talked about the shopping, but that's one area I think that's going to get addressed. We're just going to be much more efficient. We're already using it to help implementations. Implementations and NDC used to take a year and a half, they take 60 days now. Some of that's because of the stuff we're doing with AI, Some of that's because we're smarter. So there's a lot between customer impact, there's a lot because becoming more efficiency with AI. But I don't actually think it's going to fundamentally change how airlines distribute using NDC or modern airline retailing. I think it's going to make it better for them and hopefully cheaper, but we'll see.  

John: Yeah. As an industry. There are a lot of NDC well, just put them all in the "working group" umbrella. ATPCO has one, IATA has one, I think Accelya has one there. There are other vendor-oriented ones. ARC has one, right? We seem to be really fragmented in terms of how we address or try to address the gaps that are in NDC. Is there a better approach that maybe would accelerate resolving the barriers? Is it possible for us to agree on a set of priorities in any way? We talked about this a little bit yesterday as well. What are your?  

Kathy: I mean, this is where I appreciate Jost, your comment about, I hate to look backwards, but every now and then you got to look in the rearview mirror because we, especially with the emergence of agentic AI, we know it's going to be impactful. The reason you have all of that is because the concept of NDC was fundamentally flawed in its inception, which was IATA as an airline entity defining standards for an environment in which they do not operate, which is indirect channels. And so if you would go back to the beginning and have the level of collaboration that we have now, I mean, I don't even think this panel would need to be here because you would have because you would have addressed it. But if you think back, most airlines, I don't want to say all, NDC was the enabling of their .com flows into an API to drive indirect volumes. The problem is that's not how the indirect channel works. There's very little, If you look at workflows requirements, Nikki, you know this better than anyone of what an airline needs to have versus what a TMC needs to have, fundamentally different. We didn't have the this conversation soon enough. So what we need to learn going forward is as we get to these next kind of on the precipice of innovation, have the key stakeholders who have to drive it at the table. We'll figure it out.  

Nikki: Can I just say that this is there's so much chance of us repeating that same problem, and it really is very frustrating. So Kathy's absolutely right. But the one good thing about sort of going to say the Accelya meetings or to some of the ARC sessions is everyone is in the room. Now IATA are kind of focusing on orders as well as the office side of it. Trying to get in the room if you are not in an airline is almost impossible. I've tried to go to the session in June. My application to register has been rejected because I do not work for an airline. The chances of them repeating these problems are so high. So we really need the airlines to kind of say, hold on, surely we learn from this. Can we not make that same mistake again? Very annoying.  

Kathy: Exactly.  

John: Jost, do you find it difficult, from Lufthansa's point of view, to move forward on the items that are?  

Jost: Maybe switching a little bit here and thinking about in my role as the Chair of the Passenger Standards Conference of IATA, I clearly hear those concerns and we're discussing intensively because we knew that, exactly as you described it, Kathy, at the beginning was heavily airline-centered. But this is a transformation. We keep saying it's for the entire ecosystem. So everyone should have a seat at the table to define those standards.  

Still, I want to emphasize that we got a long way. So we achieved a lot of things. So can we improve further? Totally, yes. There are always ways and especially the discussion which stakeholders should be on the table. We are on this discussion right now on IATA level because from airline side, from Lufthansa, for example, we are pushing, we are saying we need to have all our ecosystem partners on the table. Now we need to get it also to the industry level that we discussed it over there to come to the right conclusion.  

However, I think we need to also embrace the fact that different partners in the ecosystem will have different needs and different priorities. They will all not be at the same pace and at the same level. This causes fragmentation and this one we probably will not be able to solve completely. So this is something we need to embrace. But I'm still emphasizing the point. We need to accept the fact that also the standards are not falling from the sky. We need to have active contribution. And that's what I'm pushing for. So on the one side, increase the bandwidth by getting more partners that actively contribute and work on the standards. But then also manage the priorities in a better way and ensure that all our needs from the different ecosystem partners are considered in the right way. So that we have eventually an ecosystem standard that works for everyone. And all the needs we have, not only for airlines but for all the partners, which goes down even to the airport or authorities that need to be involved in this transformation as well.  

John: We do have a few questions from the audience. So we just have a few minutes left. So let's see if we can address some of those. Why is there still so much focus on NDC as opposed to just airline retailing? Anybody want to?  

Jost: For me, it's a language question. For me, I'm in favour of getting away with the term of NDC. I said it's called new distribution capability. We are working on this since 10 years. I'm not sure whether we should call it like this. NDC already contains order pieces, was called COT, Customer Order Transformation in 2016. So order is already part of it. Let's rephrase it. It's modern airline retailing based on offers and orders. That's what it's all about. And this gives you the guidance of where you should put your priorities. For one airline or one organization more the shopping piece or the offer piece. Others want to solve the servicing in the first place. It's modern airline retailing.  

John: Karen Fernandez asks what is the benefit to an airline of an NDC API over just building out a robust API to match the full scope of capabilities of the host PSS?  

Kathy: Yeah, so.  

John: Opinion there, I bet.  

Kathy: As an integrator, I'll tell you because then you know how many airlines there are in the world, over 400. Do you know how hard it would be to implement 400 different versions of an API into an indirect ecosystem? Impossible, which is why standards are so important. I mean, if you go back to the end of the day, if what kind of Jim's point is, what the intent was, an NDC standard gives you a predictable interface layer, then an airline can be unique. I always would tell airlines early on, be unique in your product, differentiate on your value proposition, don't differentiate on your tech. Because when you get differentiation on your tech, you make it hard to be ingested into the channels you want to be present in. And then that becomes the friction point. So I think that it's important that we don't have multiple versions, well what we do, I would hate to repeat that. So now I think it's more about, and this is where I again, I go back to the world that I believe agentic AI and the various types of new protocols and integrations are going to make this much easier, that you want an airline to be able to do what they need to do, but you got to be able to expose it in a way that's consumable.  

Jim: I think one of the things that is the definition of full scope of the PSS and again, not slamming PSSs, they're fantastic. We wouldn't be here without them. But 50% of what we developed for our mature NDC airlines is outside the full scope of the PSS. So yeah, I'm not saying you can't do it, but again, go back and read the blog. That's one of the things that that we're finding is that people do a simple NDC and realize that that no one wants to use it and there's reasons why.  

John: Herve asks, Should we switch our focus on agentic protocols? Sorry, should we switch our focus to agentic protocols When it comes to distribution? I think that there's a question there that many airlines have invested in NDC. Now agentic AI is the key conversation going on in the industry and how airlines and systems respond to that. Should we focus more on agentic at the expense of NDC? Or is it both horses need to run at the same time?  

Jim: I don't think it's a either/or. I think it's an and. If we're not, I mean we sit down with every airline and Lufthansa is one of our customers. Everybody knows that, I think, but that's the conversation that they're having with our teams is, here are some things you want to do, can we do them differently? And AI comes into that conversation every time. So I don't think, if you look at NDC, it's, it's vertically deep and, and typically AI and agentic AI does a lot of the horizontal shallow stuff really well. So I think it's going to address a number of features within that. But the vertical deepness is probably going to be here for some time.  

Kathy: Completely agree.  

John: Should NDC consider switching from an XML standard to JSON considering most IT partners are translating XML to JSON internally. That's the deep tech question of the conversation, I guess. Jost?  

Jost: It's a yes.  

Kathy: 10 years ago, please.  

Jost: The thing is, yeah, we are discussing this again, this is something it's discussed in the relevant tech boards, how we do this transformation. Interesting enough, the question whether AI will help us to accelerate the development of the schemas, the technical schemas. So this question might become even irrelevant because to say AI will help us to actually build on the spot the new schemas in whatever language you want to use, that'll be JSON or even something else because of the JSON...  

Kathy: That's exactly right. Yeah. But the translation capabilities within the agentic protocol, it's remarkable. So I think you're going to get to a point that these conversations almost are non-existent. Yeah, because you're going to have so much flexibility. Yeah, exactly.  

John: We have time for one other question. How do you view Avianca's decision to step away from NDC and revert to traditional distribution channels?  Any thoughts?  

Jim: Big mistake.  

John: Big mistake, Jim says big mistake.  

Nikki: They might be here. I don't know. Frustrating, actually, I think because as a traveler, you probably got used to seeing the Avianca product and now suddenly it's disappeared. It's very confusing. Not the first to do it though.  

John: I would like to extend my thanks to this panel for taking the time out of their busy schedules to answer these questions and to describe their thoughts and knowledge to all of you at Elevate. Thank you everyone for attending Elevate and thank you to each of you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.  

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