American Airlines:
New Distribution
Capabilities Update

In last month’s TI Insights communication, we shared with you information relating to American Airlines’ announcement of their planned shift to what they refer to as Modern Airline Retailing. April 3rd is the target date for their proposed move of 40% of their scheduled flights to their NDC (New Distribution Capabilities) booking channel whereby selected routes will not be available through standard Global Distribution System (GDS) shopping methods.

The original goal of NDC was to expand the current limitations of the GDS mainframe architecture with a design to promote airline branding and provide rich content and amenities. Travel Incorporated, as well as the GDSs, embraced this need to evolve platforms and to enhance retailing opportunities for a more comprehensive search and purchasing platform.

The Challenge

In last month’s TI Insights communication, we shared with you information relating to American Airlines’ announcement of their planned shift to what they refer to as Modern Airline Retailing. April 3rd is the target date for their proposed move of 40% of their scheduled flights to their NDC (New Distribution Capabilities) booking channel whereby selected routes will not be available through standard Global Distribution System (GDS) shopping methods.

The original goal of NDC was to expand the current limitations of the GDS mainframe architecture with a design to promote airline branding and provide rich content and amenities. Travel Incorporated, as well as the GDSs, embraced this need to evolve platforms and to enhance retailing opportunities for a more comprehensive search and purchasing platform.

Level Setting Expectations

When considering what “Industry Ready” is to service your travel bookings and modifications, we have outlined what TI does today, and what you expect for tomorrow.

Standard Booking Capabilities through the GDS and Online Booking Systems

• Travelers can shop, book, change and cancel reservations
• Tracking and applying unused tickets through our offline agents as well as Online Booking Tools
• Providing consistent and real-tie travel data for both cost savings, traveler buying behavior analytics and Duty of Care
• Delivering a standard of service and support to assist your travelers whether prior to, during or after their itinerary
• Providing travelers with content that is consistent with publicly available flights and schedules including airline websites

While the above seems consistent with current expectations, and the industry is aggressively moving forward to deliver NDC functionality, the GDSs and Online booking tools, (including Concur) and how Travel Management
Companies service the NDC inventory will not meet the expectations outlined above by the April launch timeline.

Options for your Consideration

Option 1: Utilizing a 3rd party Aggregator for Online Bookings

Concur and other prominent online booking tool platforms have stated they are not ready to consume the NDC content and have not provided a date in 2023 to do so. Some have provided options to utilize a 3rd party
aggregator for carriers who provide a mix of traditional mainframe/EDIFACT GDS content and NDC. For SAP Concur, this Concur Select Access will process through the third-party aggregator, TravelFusion. While the
benefit of using an aggregator for online bookings provides access to full content, the challenges are many and are listed below for your review:

• Aggregator content will be required for ALL of the specific carrier’s search, not just the NDC content. With this option, there will be surcharges to access and book this inventory which will be passed on to the corporation
• Servicing these bookings will be manual by the TMC or may require assistance directly from American Airlines
• Pre-trip approvals or quality control measures via online would not be available
• Limitations with unused ticket reclaim and identification
• There will be manual updates within the GDS for the TMC to provide Duty of Care services

Option 2: GDS-Enabled Access

The GDS-Enabled option allows the Travel Management Companies to access the inventory, providing complete content for those that desire this option. While the content is available to you by TI, there are a number of
downline challenges that we outline as follows:

• For offline bookings, the travel consultants will have access to the NDC content, shopping, fare basis code, booking capabilities and duty of care support and reporting capabilities. However, the servicing of these transactions will be more time intensive by way of the original booking, changes, modifications and unknown access to methods of unused ticket identification and management
• Potential Inabilities to include:
  • Pass through TSA Pre-Check passenger known traveler number
  • The servicing capability and processes for a ticket exchange remains uncertain
  • Inability or limitations to cancel an NDC booking for future reclaim as AA has not provided details into the process, or if a process will in fact be in place at the time of launch
• Service surcharges may be incurred

Option 3: Exclude AA-NDC at Launch

By continuing to purchase your travel via standard online and TI offline consultant support without the NDC content being enabled, your travelers will be able to book through your current processes, utilizing your existing approval programs, unused ticket reclaim, cancel or modify and have complete Duty of Care servicing. However, there is the possibility of lower fares on AA.com for short haul flights that your travelers are accustomed to, but this is not yet confirmed as American Airlines has yet to disclose the fare types which will be unavailable.

Summary

While there are options for you to consider, which Travel Incorporated will support, we believe it is in our clients’ best interest to maintain existing booking processes and not enable AA NDC bookings until the industry infrastructure is firmly in place.

We will always welcome new opportunities to provide our clients with the content distribution options available and affirm our commitment to innovation as technology evolves. TI supports the progression towards Modern Retailing for our carrier partners, however, not to the degree of compromising service or our clients’ efficiency and cost avoidance initiatives. We will continue to work to ensure you are serviced as you deserve and will maintain ongoing communication and recommendations as we move forward together.