NDC is wanting, but there's no avoiding it

Q: I recently read the white paper, “How we’re striving to make new distribution capability work for business travel,” that American Express Global Business Travel made publicly available. That document lists 162 features that are not present in NDC offerings, so Amex GBT won’t be offering NDC fares to business travelers until a large number of these features become part of NDC. Frankly, NDC bookings are such a mess that we would rather avoid them, at least for the time being. Can our agency legally do what Amex is doing, or do we have to offer NDC fares?

A: Amex GBT did not actually state that it would not offer any NDC fares to any business travelers; instead, it stated more cagily that the list of 162 “use cases” are what the airlines “need to fulfill before bringing NDC content into the Amex GBT marketplace.”

As far as I know, only American requires that you offer NDC fares. As I noted in my May 15 Legal Briefs column, “Nasty surprises in AA’s addendum,” the addendum states: “Agent also shall not withhold access to American’s content available via NDC unless the request is received directly from the customer.” 

I don’t know whether Amex GBT obtained an exception to the above noted AA rule or whether it has decided to defy American. In any case, your agency does need to offer NDC fares on AA, as long as you have issued any tickets at all on American since May 1, which was the effective date of the addendum.

According to the IATA website, there are over 100 airlines that are NDC-certified by IATA; several dozen of them offer NDC fares through one or more of the GDSs; and Travelfusion lists about 35 NDC-offering carriers. Legally you are free to decline to search, offer or sell such fares, except American’s. 

For years, it has been well known that NDC presents costly challenges for corporate travel agencies, as there has been no automatic way to integrate the sales into midoffice and back-office systems in order to serve their corporate clients. While a few agencies have apparently successfully met these challenges by heavy investment in technology, most agencies have not.

Now Amex GBT has shown that NDC is a nightmare for travelers, travel arrangers and corporate travel managers as well as agencies themselves.

Here are some of the “capabilities” that NDC lacks: searching for one-way flights only, open-jaw flights, nonstop flights only, maximum number of allowed connections, multiple airports within a metro area, refundable fares only and multipassenger availability. Also needed are seat maps, costs for seats, meal requests and the ability to input passport numbers.

One particularly interesting gap is NDC’s inability to name the marketing carrier in a code-share arrangement, as required by DOT regulations. Altogether, NDC is presented as definitely not ready for prime time.

I don’t think that all of the 162 features are missing from every carrier’s NDC offering, but Amex GBT implies that NDC needs to have all of them in order to provide a viable alternative to traditional GDS offerings. 

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