Unleash Your Inner Superhero with Tech Solutions from Paxport!

New Distribution Capability (NDC) is supposed to be the future, with airlines taking back control of what they are selling and to who, complete with richer content and a way to sell like modern retailers. On paper, it should and still could be a revolution. But the question is, what’s holding back some market segmentations from fully investing?

80% of travel spend, still waiting at the gate

As a leading flight aggregator, Paxport has a clear view of the benefits that NDC has brought to the airline industry. However, we’ve also noticed a critical gap: NDC hasn’t fully taken flight in the leisure travel sector.

This is a huge miss. Leisure accounts for around 80% of travel spend, representing the massive scale of families, friends, and couples booking their annual holidays or weekend getaways.

Unfortunately, the current implementation of the NDC standard makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most leisure travel sellers to widely adopt it. This is a crucial problem that needs solving to truly unlock NDC’s potential.

The numbers no one wants to talk about

Online travel agencies (OTAs) and tour operators succeed by managing billions of potential holiday combinations (flights, hotels, etc.). These must be built and cached before a traveller searches, with some major OTAs handling over 900 billion combinations.

This vast scale makes relying on live calls to airline systems impractical. The resulting look-to-book ratios, the number of initial searches versus actual bookings would easily exceed 450,000 to 1. It would break the airline’s IT infrastructure and bankrupt the sellers.

Crucially, to maintain price accuracy (which is essential for conversion), these caches are updated multiple times a day. This necessity pushes that theoretical look-to-book ratio close to 2,000,000. Ignoring this fundamental data reality is why the leisure market remains grounded.

Let’s put the data challenge into terrifying perspective: the industry generates an estimated 3.6 TRILLION live calls every single day. That’s not a typo… It’s trillions.

This volume is driven by traveller behaviour. A recent report found that customers typically view an astonishing 277 pages of holiday offers before making a booking. With conversion rates sitting around 2-3%, that volume translates to roughly 700 billion live calls per year just to support today’s current booking volume.

This is why traditional distribution models based on live queries simply can’t work for leisure travel. For scale to be sustainable, cache must be king.

So what’s the problem?

The core issue is a lack of understanding. The sheer volume of cache data is critical to power online travel agency (OTA) and tour operator holiday packages. Without this data, airlines simply won’t get sold.

No online package seller can rely solely on live calls to airlines. Response times would suffer, conversions would plummet, and airline systems would fail to cope with the sheer volume of requests we’ve established.

While Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) understand and facilitate data dynamics, most Full-Service Carriers (FSCs) do not. This NDC gap fails the leisure market. Without essential cache data, airlines cannot package or sell to the 80% leisure market, an oversight LCCs are exploiting.

If leisure travel can’t use NDC, we’ve failed

Airlines need to stop treating packaging like an edge case, tech providers need to stop building in silos and start creating hybrid models where cache and live content work together. Cache for scale, live calls for enrichment, the two combined unlocking what we have been promising for years.

IATA’s claim of corporate NDC adoption is overstated. While 81% of surveyed airlines have live NDC channels, few offer adequate cache solutions, limiting NDC’s applicability to only 20% of the market if leisure travelers cannot use it.

The courage to finish what we started

This fix is achievable, but we must acknowledge the current setup isn’t sufficient. Cache is crucial, not an afterthought, and key to unlocking NDC and long-haul market growth. Admitting this will enable the NDC version that revolutionises everything.

NDC is a fantastic start, but until we fix this blind spot we are stuck halfway up the mountain, the opportunity is right there in front of us, we just need the courage to take it.

Paxport’s exclusive partnership with Airxelerate, a leader in delivering comprehensive tools for managing allotments and seat pooling, has the potential to re-define the way airlines work with travel sellers.

The entire team at Paxport is excited about the potential of this partnership with Airxelerate to deliver a comprehensive allotment based solution. According to Simon Taylor, Head of Commercial & Product at Paxport, the alliance will bring significant value to both airlines and travel sellers in three core areas.

Head of Commercial & Product at Paxport below offers insights into their newly formed partnership with Airxelerate.

Making Technology Do The Heavy Lifting

‘For decades, airlines and tour operators have been attracted to working both dynamically and through an allotment based model. Airline technology, specifically distribution, has evolved at pace, increasing accessibility to the right content and fares. But even today, agreeing and then managing a dedicated seat allotment remains a huge challenge. Getting seats on-sale, managing sales and reporting passenger data back to the airline is more often than not a manual process, fraught with challenge and risk.
As a result, traveller experience suffers, causing unnecessary confusion and negatively impacting their view of both the holiday provider and airline. Technology has to be the answer to this challenge. Paxport’s mission is to lead the transformation of global travel distribution and we are confident that we’re in a unique position to drive change and create efficiencies for the benefit of not just the airline and tour operator, but the traveller too.’

Driving Commercial Collaboration

‘The leisure travel industry is full of diverse businesses: OTAs, specialist tour operators, and everything in between. This diversity of product offering naturally means that each travel business will have different requirements to create their travel programme, and can also offer something different to an airline – be it passenger volume or access to a specific market segmentation.
As such, we can’t think that airline distribution should be a “one size fits all” approach. Market growth is being held back, not because parties don’t want to collaborate, but because technology is often not in place to enable better commercial cooperation.
Paxport’s partnership with Airxelerate is designed to remove technical barriers and allow airlines and travel businesses to sell capacity in new and more efficient ways, streamlining processes to manage allocations and pooled seats – bringing to market a unique way for all parties to maximise commercial opportunity and grow.’

Experience Normalises Complexities

‘Airline distribution seems to grow in complexity by the day – attend any travel conference and this is likely the takeaway you’ll get. Paxport actually sees this as an opportunity. We are uniquely placed to bridge the gap and ensure that all parties are connected in the right way. Our 30+ years of experience delivering diverse technology solutions to the travel industry makes us leaders in this space.
Our company’s philosophy is rooted in airline IT, providing airline partners with passenger management and ancillary merchandising solutions. From this position, we’ve added expertise in not only airline distribution, but also advanced digital payments.
What you learn from this experience is that no matter how complex a market can be, it is possible to normalise and remove manual and often error-prone processes. We take our mission of being The Value of Connection seriously. That’s why we’re proud to partner with Airxelerate to once again put our customers at the centre of what we do, and provide a user centric experience.’

Interested in learning more?

Why not talk to Paxport today to hear more about how they’re shaping the future of airline distribution. Click on the contact form and simply fill out your details and we’ll be in touch.

Aviation is one of the most regulated sectors in the world, for good reasons, and the complexities within the regulations can be daunting. Paxport Group has worked with European airlines for thirty years and has helped them navigate the many and various complexities by designing technology to address specific needs.

One product we have developed in-house in response to the needs of our customers – PNRGOV.

PNRGOV automates the transfer of relevant data to authorities across Europe in a way which is compatible with the EU directive on passenger data management.

The product is run out of our Stockholm office. It is available as an add-on for users of our other products in our passenger management portfolio but can also be configured to work with third-party non-Paxport systems.

The main consideration is that airlines are responsible for the transfer of data to authorities, irrespective of where the passenger booked. For airlines whose business can be characterised as scheduled, this data can be sourced and sent from the GDS, because the details are held within the GDS because that’s where the PNR sits. The GDS can do the heavy lifting, at a cost, and send the data to the authorities for the airlines in the prescribed format at the prescribed time. Job done.

But when looking at charter airlines, or scheduled airlines which make some seats available to tour operators, a gap emerges – the booking details are not held by the airline but by the tour operator’s booking engine, but the airline is still responsible for transfer of information.

The penalties for non-compliance start with a fine but could in certain cases lead to operating licences being withdrawn or aircraft confiscated – unlikely but not impossible. This is because, while the directive is an EU initiative, the directive mandates that all member states incorporate the requirements within national law. Different member states might take a different approach to enforcement, although the official documentation insists that the fines be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive.”

The application of an EU-wide directive at a national level adds another layer of complexity to the transfer of data.

The directive has led to each member state having its own “Passenger Information Unit” as the designated and exclusive collector of the data. The PIU distributes the information to the relevant national authorities.

This means an airline (or the partner they’ve outsourced this to) has to make 27 different connections to different systems using different approaches and with a different approach to integration.

The national application of an EU wide directive has other implications. Most PIUs request two-three data pushes – usually 48-24 hours before departure which often comes from the passenger management systems and another one after all passengers have boarded which comes from the DCS. But the directive also demands that all the data comes into a member state’s PIU from the same source.

Again, for GDS-based scheduled airlines this is relatively straightforward because the data come from different parts of the same business.

Paxport works with charter airlines and takes responsibility for being the approved source. We take ownership of managing the technical connections as well as the face-to-face conversations with PIU staff ahead of the integrations.

For our customers we can pull the data from the passenger management system for the first data push, and then convert the data that we source from the ground handlers and/or the DCS so that it can be overlaid onto the data already sent. For PNRGov users who are not within the Paxport ecosystem, we can convert the data from whatever system they use into the format required by the PIUs.

An EU-wide directive which gives member states the chance to personalise the directive for their own needs is complicated enough. But there is yet another layer to consider for European airlines who fly to destinations outside the EU. Post-Brexit this includes the UK.

Within the directive there are many protocols in place for the transfer of data required under the EU directive to countries which are not bound by this specific legislation. Charter airlines are less exposed to this than scheduled because passengers on a charter flight tend to be citizens of one nation. Scheduled airlines potentially have more nationalities on board, and this is another area of passenger data management where a GDS can leverage its scale and raise some revenue for itself by helping its airline clients.

Airlines operating in Europe have no choice when it comes to rules around the transfer of passenger data. For many carriers, complying with the rules is embedded into the commercial terms of their GDS contract. For others, the choice is limited to either bring the responsibility, cost and pressure of complying in-house, or find a partner with the experience and expertise to manage this process seamlessly. Paxport Group is ideally placed to be the partner – get in touch with us HERE to find out more.

It might come as a surprise to some, but Paxport Group’s distribution platform PaxFaB has made NDC content available to agents, operators and resellers for more than six years. Early 2017, we became one of the first tech suppliers – outside the GDSs – to be certified by Lufthansa Group as part of its NDC strategy.

Since then we’ve kept a close eye of NDC, building up our list of capability certifications with IATA covering the major NDC requirements across order, pay and shop.

Our take on NDC is based on the conversations we’ve had and our experience with airlines and resellers. We’ve heard the industry rhetoric, read the press releases about what NDC is capable of doing in the future (which gloss over the limitations of what it is capable of doing at the time. The over-enthusiastic promotion, by some airlines and some tech vendors, of something that was not ready put off many agents, operators and resellers.

Instead, many third-party sellers sat back and waited. As NDC matured slowly, eventually the mood shifted. For the past 18 months or, third-party sellers were thinking not if I should get into NDC, but when do I make the move, how can I minimise the disruption to my current working practices, who can I work with and what – in practical terms – can I do with this new NDC standard.

In many ways, sellers of airline content are still at the mercy of what the airlines want to do with NDC (and their long-term plans for legacy technology). The initial impetus for NDC – drive direct bookings, reduce third-party sales – has given way to a more balanced approach where selling seats through agents and operators is now seen by airlines as a good thing.

Airlines are now aware that if they want to sell seats through the trade then they also need to give the trade ways to service these bookings. But to be honest, from a Paxport perspective the NDC headwinds have never been about the difficulty selling seats – its about how can we configure our distribution platform so that agents and operators can service that seat booking once its been sold, and how can the platform add (and then service) any ancillaries or add-ons.

Servicing is vital for anyone wanting to sell full-service carriers, and, by extension, anyone looking to get into the corporate travel.

A distribution platform which has its roots in flight aggregation should not be overly focused on the schema and standards. A booking is a booking, and a distribution platform’s role is to normalise the process so that agents and tour operators can use the same workflow whether it’s channelled through EDIFACT, or XML, or JSON, or other schema in the market.

Normalisation is a core feature of our platform, and many PaxFaB users are already consuming content via the NDC API without realising it. This shows that NDC can be embedded into existing processes, with the benefits of NDC surfaced without additional direct and indirect costs.

As mentioned, NDC gives airlines control, so the benefits to resellers will vary according to what incentives the airline – lower fees, lower fares, more content to sell. Today, (most) airlines see agents more as a friend not a foe, so the benefits of adopting NDC will grow over time as more airlines offer it, more agents consume it, more travellers book through it, more revenue is generated.

But while we’re quite positive about NDC, it’s not the silver bullet that everyone thought it was. It is a standard, but its not consistent – look at what “Airline A” is offering through NDC compared with “Airline B”. And with many airlines using different versions of NDC, there are some technical issues which agents need to be aware of – or which the distribution platform used by the agent needs to be aware of.

Overall, our recommendation is that agents and operators can ignore yesterday’s hype and focus on today’s reality. NDC is nothing to be nervous about providing you have a partner who understands airlines and distribution and is already doing NDC.