IATA Update

Transcript

Yanik Hoyles:Is NDC really relevant? The best way to answer your question is with some facts. 44 airlines are today live NDC, have the NDC capability. Another 68 airlines have told us they've got plans in the next 2 or 3 years to deploy NDC. That's 30% more than last year. There are 50 technology companies, including the 3 GDSs, who are certified they can use the NDC standard. 2 weeks ago, the CEOs of the 3 GDSs— Sabre, Amadeus, and Travelport— said that NDC was the way forward, and all 3 committed to being certified as aggregators Level 3 in 2018. And finally, you'll have heard in the press also in the last 2 weeks that even the chief executive of Carleson-Wagon-Lit Group said that NDC can help airlines become true retailers through the travel agent channel. So that's proof, I think, that NDC is definitely becoming relevant. This is absolutely not a GDS bypass, and it's absolutely not about airlines selling direct. If airlines wanted to increase sales on their websites, they wouldn't need IATA, they wouldn't be talking to travel agents, they wouldn't be talking to corporate buyers. And what we've made very, very clear for quite 2 or 3 years now is that for NDC to be successful, It does not only need the support of the GDSs, collaboration with the GDSs, but the whole value chain. And the fact that the 3 GDSs have announced they're going to be certified Level 3 aggregators means they're really engaged as well. So it's definitely a collaborative issue for airlines to be able to sell what they can do on their website through travel agents. Another way of looking at NDC— NDC is about giving the full-service carriers the ability to use API-type connectivity, which is exactly the way low-cost carriers distribute. So ultimately, we're trying to simplify, but it's true that maybe today the way we distribute our products in our airline industry today is so complex, is so old legacy technology, that to extricate ourselves to the world of internet, it is difficult. The NDC standard is in its 5th iteration after 2 years. It's now at a point where companies like Amadeus say the standard is robust enough to talk about industrialization. So that means we're really at a key point in terms of the deployment of the standard. The commercial strategies that airlines are applying have actually, from IATA's point of view, got nothing to do with NDC in the sense that NDC, as we define it, is a technical standard. I have mixed feelings when I hear that airlines are applying these commercial strategies and calling them NDC. On the one hand, I don't want to be associated with commercial strategies because, as I said, IATA It's just a technical standard we're delivering. It's business model agnostic. So whether some airlines use a surcharge, others like American in the States use an incentive, then it shows it's business model agnostic. On the other hand, what I feel really good though is that no one has to do NDC. So if some airlines are spending so much time and energy in designing a commercial strategy around this standard that's just an enabler, it shows they see value in it. Thank you, Yanik.

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