Air content distribution is one of the most active areas of the industry at this point of time. While the adoption of NDC gathers steam on the one hand, what develops simultaneously on the other is the world of ONE Order.
NDC and ONE Order are closely intertwined and ONE Order in its developed form is only one of the logical outcomes of what NDC set out to achieve, i.e. to make airline retailing easy and to OFFER the customer exactly what they are looking for.
So for the uninitiated, what is ONE Order? As described by IATA, it is “an industry-led initiative aiming to simplify the airline reservation, delivery, and accounting systems by gradually phasing out the current booking and ticketing records (PNRs, e-tickets, and EMDs)…combining those multiple records into a single retail and customer-focused order”.
The goal of ONE Order is “a single customer order record holding all data elements required for order fulfillment across the travel cycle”.
While this concept of a ‘single’ customer order may be new to the airline retailing industry, it has been at the very heart of many other retailing businesses for a long time already. Consider your shopping experience on Amazon.com or any other retailer site where you have the ability to shop for multiple products from multiple suppliers and yet have one single record of sale.
Now visualize this shopping experience and combine it with the buying of travel services in a similar manner. Not only that, visualize yourself as a customer that is being presented with an ‘OFFER’ that is tailor made to you thanks to your preferences that have already been considered by the provider before making you an ‘OFFER’. Interesting! Isn’t it?
While airlines have long intended to differentiate content and offer specific content to specific customers, it was the limitations of legacy standards and processes that hindered this intent. The desire of the airlines to gain control of the distribution process and to ‘OFFER’ customers exactly what they need and how they need is what makes this area so dynamic and interesting. This move away from legacy processes to new standards is what is enabling this whole vision into becoming a reality.
As we have seen over the last years, the NDC and Air Retailing journey is a long journey. The fact though is that this journey is now being made much quicker and with greater strides now than it has in the past.
While IATA’s goal to achieve ‘modern airline retailing by 2030 seems ambitious at this point of time, the reality is that this is a highly dynamic field that is witnessing a speed of change like has not been seen before.
How does this affect you as a travel agency? Read more on the topic here.
