Always interesting to listen to what travel agencies think about #NDC and what they expect. Here are some takeaways from a recent interview (in French) of a French OTA:
👉 “B2C travel agents don’t need product details. We never asked for NDC”: It’s true that this particular OTA only displays the date, the origin and destination, the duration and the price. A tiny logo but no airline name! This is extreme commoditization of travel for the price-sensitive customers. I understand better why (an API connection to) more product information is irrelevant for this OTA.
👉 “NDC does not enable to modify a booking or to cancel a ticket”: This must be referring to an early version or implementation of NDC. Since 2017 the NDC standard supports the servicing of orders.
👉 “NDC is for the large European carriers, US carriers are not interested”: European carriers like Finnair or Aegean are very advanced on NDC, as well as United or American in the US. I wonder where such statement is coming from and how this perception may have developed.
👉 “Kodak invented and patented the digital camera but did not exploit it to protect its main business”: Good to know and the parallel with the initial GDS reaction to NDC is interesting. GDSs enabled XML-API distribution before NDC existed but pushed back on the industry standard.
👉 “Travelfusion is the 4th GDS, they focus on the gaps of the main GDSs: LCC and NDC content”: Travelfusion indeed pioneered (since 2000) the connection to airline content, including via XML API, long time before IATA proposed a standard API (2012). So what is the problem again? API-based content? Standard API? The business model of the content aggregator?
Les GDS risquent une disparition à la Kodak, selon Fabrice Dariot
