Skift Take
It's ironic that new distribution capabilities got to the cusp of becoming real at the precise moment everyone stopped booking flights.
Many airlines and travel agencies are rethinking their technology spending plans amid tighter budgets. At the same time, they also want to get ready for when a sustained rebound in travel appears.
Airline executives have talked for years about how the sector should embrace novel ways of selling airfares. But change has been dripping slow. Countless airlines, agencies, and vendors have said they need to adopt new technologies, processes, and commercial models, yet most have been finicky about actually doing those things.
The best-known, overarching effort to improve how agencies sell tickets is the new distribution capability (NDC) — a set of standards for how computers talk to each other. The effort has run into stiff headwinds. Different airlines and agencies are running different versions of the NDC standards.
So some organizations have debuted "NDC Exchange" services. These services help normalize the data. That normalization is a bit like a voltage converter for electric current. An exchange lets airlines and agencies can talk to each another even if they're on different versions of the technical standards.
Air Canada, for example, has since August 2018 been sending its data to agencies via an airline-backed effort is by ATPCO, the airfare clearinghouse formerly k
