Mark Pestronk
Q: In Travel Weekly's recent Travel Industry Survey 2025, there was a startling statistic: Only 17% of travel advisors stated that NDC is a positive development for travel agencies. Conversely, since the survey shows that most advisors know about NDC, it follows that the majority of respondents probably see NDC as a negative. To my mind, this means that NDC has been a failure, despite 13 years of efforts by many of the world's airlines to coerce or encourage agencies to adopt NDC. Do you agree that it has been a failure, and if so, why did it fail?
A: It is still too early to write off NDC as a failure. With further development and a few key marketing changes, it could still replace the 40-year-old airline/GDS/agency structure in about five years.
I see NDC as the latest weapon in a 40-year battle by the airlines to avoid the fees that the airlines must pay to present their offerings to travel advisors. Those fees exceed $3.50 per segment, so that a roundtrip booking with a connecting flight in each direction costs a domestic airline about $14. Foreign carriers pay more than U.S. carriers do.
All amounts are closely guarded trade secrets, so my estimates are based on hearsay and knowledge of how much money the GDS vendors share with major travel agencies.
There are four things wrong with NDC; if the carriers could fix them, the future of NDC would be assured.
- First, as has been widely reported, at least some carriers' NDC offerings lack functionality that Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport provide. While the basic NDC standard is capable of handling these functionalities, individual airlines have been too slow to roll them out.
- Second, unless an agency invests heavily in technology, there are no seamless ways to integrate data from NDC into the agency's back office. So accurate management reporting is next to impossible, and agency accounting, which was revolutionized by the Trams back-office system, has been set back a generation.
- Third, for high-volume corporate travel, NDC is not equipped to integrate company travel policies into its offerings, and no systems offer reports on where all of a company's travelers are at one time, as the GDSs routinely do. According to corporate travel experts, NDC has largely ignored what corporate travel managers need.
- Finally, and most importantly, the carriers are not offering adequate financial incentives to agencies to switch. Perhaps they do not realize that for most large agencies, GDS incentives are the largest and most reliable single source of revenue.
A very important aspect of GDS incentives is that they are (with exceptions) fixed for the entire multiyear term of the agency-GDS contract. So carriers would need to make long-term financial commitments in order to match what GDSs offer.
If NDC really has the "modern retailing" advantages that the carriers claim, it would make sense for the carriers to provide incentives that match or exceed GDSs offers. Then travelers would receive the personal offerings that NDC promises, and carriers would make more money selling more ancillary and bundled services.