NDC Transition: How Intermediaries Bridge Legacy GDS and Modern Airline APIs

As airlines seek to use state-of-the-art APIs to provide unique fares, on-demand offers, and bountiful ancillary offers directly, they are pursuing the New Distribution Capability rollout at an increased pace. Many carriers impose surcharges by waiving content availability on traditional EDIFACT-based global distribution systems at the same time.

The situation of travel sellers today is tough. They have to ensure continuity of legacy GDS processes, which have stood the test of time for many years and continue to perform, but also accommodate an increasing range of direct airline links. It’s not simply a decision between one channel or another; this is a successful management process. It requires an agile middleware layer to integrate and normalize both GDS and NDC content into a single, seamless search and servicing flow. This solution allows for the retention of the RX supply chain efficiency for intermediaries, maintains conversion levels, and provides retail opportunities that are optimized for the changing distribution environment.

NDC Paradox: Retailing Freedom vs. Operational Friction
The retailing benefits for airlines and sellers using NDC are tremendous. Rich media information like interactive seat maps and detailed ancillary options, dynamic pricing, and personalized offers come directly from the carrier’s offer and order management systems. Sellers can have more flexibility when proposing attractive packages and be able to monetize on all additional assets.

But this freedom comes at a hefty price in terms of the operating hassle. Whereas a legacy GDS offers excellent standardized post-booking servicing (passenger name record management, exchanges, refunds and scheduling change), it has largely failed to get its offerings to passengers right. Legacy GDSs excel at standardized post-booking servicing (passenger name record management, exchange, refunds, and scheduling change) but have struggled with getting passengers’ servicing right. With an NDC model, it passes a good portion of this responsibility onto the seller. If agencies fail to use raw NDC connections with a strong NDC mid-office, it is likely that they will experience some issues when disasters hit them.

Manual intervention for delayed and/or alternate flights is time consuming and prone to error. There is a paradox inherent in NDC: it frees up new potential for retailing while bringing in the increased requirements for servicing from intermediaries that have access to the existing GDS built. In this instance, travel software development is integral in helping to solve these operational challenges by developing integration layers.

Fragmentation Trap: Why Standardized NDC Isn’t Standard
While drawn-up by IATA, NDC is implemented differently by individual airlines. Each carrier implements different versions of the schema, with extensions for any carrier-specific features. Having to connect to 15 different airlines means maintaining 15 separate API schemas and API authentication, message structure, etc. and handling 15 different error responses. With this fragmentation comes a significant burden on the travel sellers and tech supplier integration.

This fragmentation must be addressed via the detailed software engineering skills required in the stripping of travel data and will take considerable effort. To tackle this challenge, specialized application software suppliers, such as GP Solutions, construct unified API aggregation engines. There are several custom middleware solutions that GP Solutions can build to unify disparate NDC feeds and legacy GDS content in a structured data model so that travel platforms can present consistent search results without having to rewrite their core booking engines for each new airline API. This normalization layer is a way to reduce development overhead and to provide uniform user experiences on a variety of content sources of mixed type.

Architectural Bridge: Normalization Layers and Servicing Automation
There are a number of architectural characteristics that are important for the success of NDC adoption. Under two seconds, unified search and caching mechanisms integrate the content from multiple carriers (multi-carrier NDC) with the GDS EDIFACT responses, ensuring a safe conversion rate even in periods of peak usage. Automated order servicing optimizes the after-sales process, allowing for efficient re-ticketing, involuntary exchanges, and ancillary modifications via a single centralized platform. Back-office synchronization allows data to be brought back and forth between NDC Order IDs and the traditional PNR structures, providing a way to get reconciled data to accounting, enterprise resource planning, and risk management systems.

Post bookings are the real indicators of an NDC integration. These mid-office and back-office workflows are complex processes that receive a lot of attention from software solutions providers such as GP Solutions. GP Solutions allows the highest-volume travel sellers to easily and automatically manage exchanges, refunds, and schedule changes on both the NDC and legacy GDS systems without a rise in man-hours. The travel industry software solutions assist intermediaries in coping with the transition effectively and ensuring operational excellence.

Strategic Benefits and Implementation Considerations
This architectural bridge creates opportunities to secure several benefits for the intermediary who is able to put it into place. Servicing rich GDS content and capturing offers not in NDC for their revenue growth. One underlying benefit of unified platforms is that they cut down on the instruction needed of agents and the productivity of the agents. Enhanced supplier relationships and more accurate forecasting are another benefit of real-time visibility but these aren’t limited to channels; they extend throughout all channels.

The implementation takes good planning. Organizations should review existing technology maturity level, identify high-volume routes to implement NDC first, and define clear governance to map data and manage errors in NDC. Pilot runs with real airline connections and tracking key performance indicators minimize disruption to regular operations. This process is accelerated by preferred partners that already have travel domain knowledge and can offer connectors and best practice advice.

Conclusion
NDC is no longer a future dream but a current business necessity to competitively retail air. Intermediates who spend money on versatile, normalized API design change distribution disintegration into a strategic retailing benefit. These platforms provide the reliability of the traditional GDS servicing models and the innovation of the new NDC content, making operations resilient, efficient, and growth-oriented.

Airlines continue to see distribution evolve and those who have solid-middleware solutions will continue to have strong footing in the marketplace. Seamless system integration between legacy and modern systems will be a key piece to success in travel distribution for the long term. In the future, organizations that take decisive steps towards creating these architectural bridges will be best suited to assert themselves successfully in the game of industry development.