Why IATA’s NDC is important

IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) hopes to modernise content distribution across the airline industry. We jumped on the NDC bandwagon as soon as it really got rolling 2 years ago, and last week we were speaking about our experience at IATA’s 3rd annual Business Travel Summit. That summit really shows that airlines now recognise the business travel industry as critical partners in modernising their own industry.

Perhaps we can all modernise together?

That’s certainly how we feel about NDC here at Click Travel.

Our goal with travel.cloud has always been to give the business traveller the same experience they’d get booking on a supplier’s own website. This isn’t just vanity or cosmetics. Business travellers don’t muck about. If they can’t find what they need on their company’s chosen booking tool, they’ll just book it on the airline website and beg their manager to approve the expense claim later. It’s called “leakage” and it is ruinous.

It hurts the company, as they no longer have a consolidated view of their travel spend and they no longer have the influence they expect their TMC to give them on their traveller’s spending habits.

It hurts the TMC, because their tool is seen as a barrier instead of an enabler, trust is destroyed, and of course revenue is lost because they aren’t getting the bookings!

It hurts the traveller, because instead of having all their bookings organised in one place, and the right support & duty of care from their company and TMC, they are on their own. They also probably wasted time shopping around the internet.

It hurts airlines too. What? Yeah. If we can’t put the airline’s full offer on travel.cloud then they can’t differentiate themselves from the competition. So all the well-behaved travellers who do use their company’s booking tool will be selecting purely on the basis of cost and schedule, and not on the airline’s best offer.

But with a direct NDC connection to the airline, we can now set about making the offer on travel.cloud look every bit as good as the offer on the airline’s own website. It sounds like a small change, but the knock-on effect right through the chain is going to be huge.

That’s why NDC is important.