One order, many obstacles: airlines navigate the slow evolution of modern retailing

The airline industry's NDC revolution was supposed to transform distribution, give airlines greater control over their products and create a more personalised retail experience. Instead, progress has been uneven, implementation remains slow and the transition to modern airline retailing is proving far more complicated than the original vision implied.

At the T2RLEngage 2026 conference in London in Sep-2026, the discussion moved beyond the familiar promise of NDC towards a harder question: how can airlines move from today's fragmented systems to an integrated model of Offer, Order, Settle and Deliver (OOSD) without compromising commercial performance or operational reliability?

The answer is emerging through incremental change rather than wholesale replacement. T2RL's concept of "escaped functionality" describes how airlines and third parties are developing capabilities outside traditional passenger service systems (PSS), one component at a time. Its market analysis highlights a concentrated supplier landscape, while T2RL research indicates that an airline can wait an average of two years between signing an NDC agreement with a global distribution system and going live.

Riyadh Air illustrates both the ambition and the difficulty of building an OOSD architecture. The wider lesson is that modern retailing is not a technology installation. It is a multi-year commercial and operational transformation, requiring modular design, supplier collaboration, contractual control and a clear focus on measurable value.