Airlines Reporting Corp. on Wednesday released a set of 20 New Distribution Capability best practices, about 15 months after forming its NDC Advancement Working Group.
The best practices cover nine categories, including handling exchanges, order change notifications, ticketing time limits, debit memos, unused value, modifiers and qualifiers, efficiency, waivers and general items.
“These are not standards,” ARC senior manager of Direct Connect and One Order Paige Blunt told BTN. “We are not a standard-setting organization.”
She added: “We aren’t going to put a report card out. That’s not our role. The collaboration that we’ve had would really indicate that all parties are focused on success.”
Blunt led the working group, which included participation from seven airlines, six travel technology providers and global distribution systems, six online travel agencies and consolidators, and 17 travel management companies, according to ARC. The group met once virtually and four times in person over the course of its charter.
Not every best practice is designed to be adopted by each stakeholder, and the recommendations are part of a “living document” that will continue to evolve, said Blunt.
One best practice that won broad support among stakeholders concerned order change notifications, Blunt said. In the new best practice, agencies should receive all change notifications, including the source of the change. “They were talked about almost in every meeting,” she said.
Another area of agreement involved handling changes, which is covered by six best practices. Still, that’s one area where more work could be done, said Blunt.
Industry stakeholders, including ARC head of global airline partnerships Chuck Crowder, addressed NDC best practices last week at The Beat Live conference in New York. Based on the discussion, it was clear to see where some stakeholders could more easily come together and where roadblocks remain to advance NDC.
“NDC is a communication standard. It’s how you send messages back and forth,” United Airlines vice president of sales strategy and effectiveness Glenn Hollister said at the event. “There is no NDC standard for the business processes about how things work. So, we’ve got this situation where different airlines are building stuff, and we realize afterwards that the business processes are different. As an industry, we need to get better at standardizing the business processes that are about things that don’t make us special.”
Hollister noted that “all airlines have credits; we all want them to work the same way.”
However, he said there’s also been pressure to standardize in areas where airlines seek differentiation. “My cabins are not the same as my competitors’. My clubs are not the same,” he said. “I don’t want those standardized, and we’re going to resist that.” He added, “We are different companies with different offerings, and that needs to show up at the point of sale.”
The standardization of ancillaries is another area that may take some time. United offers ancillary bundles, but some airlines do not, “so that’s a capability we’re trying to make better and get out there faster,” Accelya chief customer success officer Tye Radcliffe said Tuesday at the conference. He added that exchanging an electronic miscellaneous document isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. “We’re building that now so that you don’t necessarily have to cancel the EMD completely and build a new one,” he said.
Flight Centre Travel Group global manager of travel distribution Nicola Ping, who participated in the ARC’s working group, was not convinced that EMD exchanges “translate into something that truly means something,” she said at The Beat Live. “This is where I think that what we need to do is be better at talking in terms that everybody understands. We have to talk behind the scenes on the EMD exchange because that’s how the airlines make it work. But when we are talking externally and making it work in the front end of Concur or Cytric, we have to talk in terms the people understand. That’s what ARC has done a good job with in the best practices.”
Hollister also noted that one advancement he’s seen is that there now are “a handful” of TMCs using NDC at scale, and those that do are those who own a large part of their tech stack. “But it’s very much the exception,” he said. The “biggest barrier” comes from companies “doing NDC through third-party tech stacks.”
ARC’s Blunt acknowledged that there is more work to do, and that even though the initial charter for the group ends this month, the working group would continue to meet in 2025.
In addition, Blunt said that ARC is pulling together a travel buyers’ council to address trends affecting their managed travel programs, such as NDC, omnichannel and payments. The council currently has about 30 buyers, and a 2025 planning call is scheduled this month.
