TMC leaders address NDC concerns at ITM conference

CWT’s president and CEO Patrick Andersen bemoaned certain airlines’ resolute approach to NDC adoption at last week’s ITM conference in Brighton, UK, suggesting that clients, travellers and the supply chain will suffer as a result of it.

“We all share in the aspirations of NDC and the industry has a responsibility to provide that. We all want the best experience for our travellers. We all want to make sure that we have access to the right inventory. We all want to make sure we have a shopping experience that allows you to feel the product better,” said Andersen.

But without naming the leading protagonist, American Airlines, which removed some 40 per cent of its content from traditional GDS EDIFACT channels last month as it pursued its NDC ambitions, Andersen said: “One party racing off and saying ‘problems be damned we’re going to do it anyway’… is that going to push us all forward a bit? Probably. Is it good for the supply chain that needs that? No. Will clients, travellers and the supply chain suffer as a result? Yes.”

In an ITM survey of around 100 buyers, the results of which were released at the event, 60 per cent felt their TMC has not been adapting to changes in the distribution landscape and were not ready for the onset of NDC-based airfares. In a separate BTN Group survey of 250 European buyers, around half of respondents were happy with their TMC’s plans to provide NDC content.

“That’s a reflection on TMCs and on the supply chain itself. It should be a lot more joined up,” said Andersen, commenting on the ITM survey. “We’ve been dealing with content fragmentation in the hotel space for a long time. The vast majority of hotels in Europe sit outside the GDS.”

Andersen, who was named CWT chief executive in April last year, continued: “Air content sourcing is a lot more complex. Where the data resides is changing in an NDC environment, but we need to solve that and in a scalable way. I think we are and we will solve for it at scale in the same way the industry has overcome other challenges.

“There might be some dissatisfaction in the process but we must make sure it’s scalable and that specifically the element of being able to service travellers once they’ve bought something is still possible.”

BUSINESS TRAVEL RECOVERY CONTINUES
CWT’s Patrick Andersen (pictured) said business travel recovery stabilised at around 70 per cent of 2019 levels at the end of 2022. “Demand has not continued to accelerate to the same degree we saw in the second and third quarters of last year,” he said. He noted that while “China’s travelling at 110 per cent, the US is closer to 60 per cent and European countries are somewhere in between.” He continued: “We saw high-tech lead the way in 2022 then they slammed on the breaks. Life sciences continues, energy, resources and marine continues to see an increase in demand, there’s lots of professional services and financial services are really a mixed bag. There are many dimensions at play in the recovery.”
Meanwhile, Amex GBT’s Drew Crawley said the TMC had seen business travel volumes recover to 72 per cent last year, with SMEs leading the way on 82 per cent and multinationals “slightly slower”. He continued: “Pre-pandemic GBT was probably more exposed to larger customers than small. We were probably 60 per cent, 40 per cent global versus small spend clients. Now we’re more like 50/50.” He added: “Overall we’re seeing good progress. We’re very pleased with last year and 2022 revenue was double that of 2021.”

In a separate keynote interview at the Institute of Travel Management's 2023 conference, American Express Global Business Travel’s Drew Crawley, who was named president of the TMC in January, accepted that “the legacy options available to airlines have constrained the way they’re able to operate in the marketplace” and that NDC “allows them to add richer content and, frankly, to drive yields up and cost out”.

He continued: “I think buyers need to ask what the value of NDC is to them. The airlines aren’t doing it to make less money, they’re doing it to make more money – and they need to make more money. The airline industry needs to be healthy.”

While NDC in leisure travel is relatively straightforward, said Crawley, “when NDC collides with business travel there is an ecosystem it hits which I don’t think has been navigated as well as it could have been and that’s the challenge we have at the moment”.

Noting that one carrier recently described its approach to NDC as ‘evolution rather than revolution’, Crawley added: “I think that’s probably the way I would prefer but the key question we must ask ourselves is whether evolution has worked thus far. It’s taken us ten years to get where we are today and nothing much has happened.”

Amex GBT announced last week the pilot roll-out of Air France and KLM NDC content in its Neo and Egencia platforms which Crawley said was the result of a three-way collaboration between the TMC, the airlines and global distribution system Amadeus.

He pointed to the TMC’s development of a Minimum Marketable Product standard which includes shopping, booking, ticketing, re-shopping, refunding and reporting capabilities. It has “gone down very well” with airlines, said Crawley. “We have set out a standard and the requirements we need to turn on NDC for an airline partner. They must meet those standards before we turn it on or pandemonium will ensue and NDC will get a bad name from the get go. We need to make it successful for our airline partners and our clients.”

Crawley lamented the lack of standardisation in NDC developments saying that some 80 airlines currently have some form of NDC capability but “they’re all slightly different. What that means is that we have to ingest NDC on an airline-by-airline basis, on a GDS-by-GDS basis, and on a country-by-country basis. You can imagine how inefficient that is.”

He indicated the TMC would prioritise the delivery of NDC content through GDS channels, explaining that they have the expertise in aggregating content and presenting it in a practical shopping environment. “That is an incredibly complex thing to do and it’s technology that the GDS are rather good at. Ingesting NDC through the GDS to deliver to the TMC platforms, and beyond to OBTs, is a very practical step because it’s using the smarts that exist in the industry today.”