NDC: Nothing Decent Coming

Travel agency API standard for booking tickets was predicted to grow 15% annually. The truth is that no one cares.

“Gradual”. That’s how most travel industry representatives assess the pace of adoption of the not-so-new-anymore airline message protocol NDC. Since its initial hype back in 2019, the New Domain Capability was sold as airlines’ secret weapon against the dominant position that GDS like Amadeus and Sabre have on airline ticket distribution. Under the traditional, GDS-centered model, airlines were purportedly blocked from providing more tailored data to travel agents.

By setting up a “disruptive” API standard, we were told, airlines would be able to bypass GDS and turn themselves into tech platforms, to which developers could integrate their software products. Consistency, they said, was the key to wide adoption.

None of this happened, of course. Even against the backdrop of COVID-19, airlines have treated NDC with strategical aloofness, and their biggest adopters have been the very same GDS the protocol was trying to bypass. They have been the first to adopt it in order to forestall migration efforts.

This reminded me of Instagram boldly copying Snapchat: by leaning into competitors’ technology features, established marketplaces erase from the mind of their users the thought of leaving their ecosystems.

IATA’s analysis of what was needed to take down GDS supremacy was flawed. It wasn’t that coders were in need of a common way to talk to airlines’ computers. It’s that APIs are not strategic to airlines.

But how could that be? Didn’t American Airlines partner with Google to provide real time translation in their airport lunges? Didn’t British Airways positioned itself as a technology-focused airline and spearheaded the use of AI to minimize delays? Didn’t Lufthansa begin to ride the AI wave too to create “a more personalized experience”?

This is paradoxical only if we catch the disease of thinking that tech is One Coherent Thing, the same disease which urges grandmas to ask their IT employed grandsons to fix their printers. Tech is however a vast ecosystem, and it is key for airlines to deploy their resources where superior performance yields results for their customers, rather than everywhere.

It’s no coincidence that what long haul carriers are deploying cutting edge technology on the very visible passenger experience, while leaving together their IT infrastructure hanging in there in the name of Return On Invested Capital. Backstage, “good enough” reigns supreme.

IATA’s communication protocol is addressing a pain that airline executives aren’t feeling: even though the booking technology is outdated, customers can still book tickets. Both for long haul carriers and budget airlines, moving away from GDS into their own websites, having full control over how to present ancillaries to the customers to maximize revenue, does the same trick, and is way easier to develop than to adopt a design-by-committee standard that no one else is using either.

As a result, NDC is a feature that no one really asked for, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that its adoption is still “gradual”.