Over-promised And Under-delivered: The NDC Problem

Oojo.com CEO, Gulce Karsli Rozenveld, speaks to Travel Monitor, offering a frank take on the state of NDC from a frontline perspective. This op-ed sheds light on why standardisation (not just innovation) is the real missing link, the reason why booking rates via NDC remain under 20 per cent and the technical chaos OTAs face when connecting to airline NDC content. Airlines make bold claims about NDC, but behind the scenes, there is a lot of mess. As an OTA, we navigate constant chaos and inconsistencies, and at the end of the day, it’s us who absorb the extra costs and inefficiencies. It’s time for the industry to call out the overpromised future. Airlines have long touted NDC as a game-changer. Two promises were made: first, that dynamic pricing will lead to better results and increased sales; and second, that airlines will soon offer a complete and standardized way of delivering fares and extra services via NDC. The reality is a bit dimmer, garnished with a bitter taste of technical problems. No matter how much effort we invest in the OTA side, the road is plagued with many technical challenges for each and every airline content we want to sell on NDC, so we often resort to ignoring the content altogether. The second claim has been that airlines will soon offer a complete and standardized way of delivering fares and extra services via NDC. What we see, however, is far from standard: setups vary wildly from one carrier to another; no two integrations work alike. It becomes clear pretty quickly that each airline has built its own version of this new system, which means that even when we use an aggregator, we and the aggregators must still perform special adjustments for each airline. The promised uniformity is nowhere in sight. Continue reading here.