Airline Retailing creates value in 5 ways and by clicking on the tabs below you will find concrete success stories from industry players.

Presentations will be published regularly via this website. Presentations that illustrate benefits to the 5 points below are very welcome. Please contact us if you are interested to participate.

Development of New Offers 

The development of new offers will create additional value and opportunities through new and richer content being made available to the end consumers. In a modern retailing world, airlines are more agile and can create dynamic bundles of products that will better fit customer’s needs. See some concrete examples below:

New products and services
  • Airlines embracing retailing are pushing new content through their NDC channel. Different airlines can have a very different approach to development of new products and services and how they engage with the customer. See below some of these approaches:
    - American Airlines
    - British Airways
    - Qantas
  • Xiamen Airlines together with their partners are delighted with the value they gained from blending their vision for enhanced passenger travel experience with using NDC standard. A selection of 3 of their top 6 ancillaries and examples of customer segmentation are demonstrating mutual value and growth. Watch the video of Xiamen Airlines (March 2022) and their written case study.
New corporate bundles
  • Business travelers want richer airline content, ancillaries and services as part of their corporate booking solution. TripActions together with their airline partner United airlines have introduced the first corporate dynamic bundles, allowing seat selection with the help of a seat map. As a result, corporate buyers are now able to enjoy enhanced services.

      Download their presentation (Nov 2019, BTN Webinar).

  • Corporate Travel Management (CTM) demonstrating the ability to recognise airline tailored offers based on route, flight number, day of week, RBD, cabin, fare family, departure dates and departure time and enabled to CTM, FF tier or Client ID specifically. CTM together with their Airline partner Qantas Distribution Platform (QDP) integration ensure only relevant content is shown to client through their “Lightning” Online Booking Tool. Check their presentation and watch the video (June 2021). Highlight: NDC tailored offers.
  • An airline perspective: from Fares and Availability to Offers.
    Air France - KLM group addressing their ambition and success stories on Continuous pricing, offering more granular & dynamic pricing ancillaries, and introducing a new offer as a bundle. Check their presentation and watch the video.
    "Providing more retail experience is essential for all our travellers, including business travellers’’
    Louise Koffler, Program Manager, Offer Management at Air France - KLM

    Highlight: improve the shopping experience, address customer segmentation.
3rd party offering
Carbon offset
  • American Airlines embracing retailing is pushing a new and differentiated content adopted by Airline Retailing to customers that they want, and they feel extend of value to them. Watch the video (June 2022) 
    "American is leveraging modern retailing to ensure our agency partners and mutual customers have a seamless shopping experience in the channels where they choose to purchase travel. We’ve recently introduced a number of new products, such as Main Plus and Main Select, as part of a modern retailing experience and we are excited to enable the ability to purchase a carbon offset seamlessly with one-click within the purchase path for our customers" 

      Anthony Rader, Director, Distribution Strategy, American Airlines 

 
   
 

Enhanced Revenue Management 

 

Enhanced revenue management strengthens customer analytics and retailing capabilities by implementing new revenue management solutions built on booking request context, leveraging deeper customer insights and demand drivers.  This includes a new approach to total revenue management, optimization across all offer components and the introduction of dynamic pricing. See some concrete case studies below:

Continuous pricing
  • Drivers towards dynamic offering
    Airlines have clear aspirations for more dynamic methods of Offer creation aiming to offer passengers a better experience. With Dynamic Offers they will be able to adapt and adjust their Offers in response to market conditions and consumer shopping patterns. Check quick reference guide on Creating Value in Airline Retailing with Dynamic Offers (pdf).
Dynamic offers in revenue management 

Optimized Distribution Mix 

 

Modern retailing also enables content differentiation by channel and the establishment of new partnerships with a broader landscape of partners. This results in the emergence of new business and partnership models in the area of airline retailing to better serve the customer. See some concrete examples below: 

Optimized distribution channels
  • Business Travelers are now able to receive extra information on the number of status credits and frequent flyers tiers status that cannot be achieved via the legacy GDS connection. Corporate Travel Management (CTM) together with their Airline partners Qantas and Singapore Airlines present their NDC content integration available via their online booking tool “Lightning”. Watch the video (June 2020).
New business models
  • New commercial models are starting to emerge: In September, December 2020 and February 2021, Air France/KLM, Lufthansa Group and IAG announced new commercial deals with Amadeus, Sabre and then Amadeus respectively, initiating landmark changes in some of the largest commercial distribution contracts across the global industry. See some articles in the press below:
    - Air France/KLM
    - Lufthansa group
    - IAG

Important : IATA is not involved in airlines’ commercial strategies and model definition, but we do follow closely all public information in these areas in order to better understand their impact on standard adoption.
TMC focus on multi-sourcing
  • TMC have been looking to enhance their services by managing content based on multi-source technology. This allows them to present to their customers the results of a complete and perfect search the same way they would have access online. AmexGBT and their airline partner American Airlines present their NDC content integration available via the OBT “Neo”. Check their presentation and watch the video (June 2020).

 

  • ATPI multichannel approach, using multi-source technology. This allow them to provide customers the best fly options and the best offers available. ATPI together with:
    - Qantas and Travelport
    - Lufthansa Group and ATPI Mercury
    - British Airways and Travelfusion

    Check their presentation and watch the video (June 2021)     

Better Customer Targeting and Engagement 

 

The journey to Airline Retailing is about moving to a world of Offers and Orders allowing airlines to sell products in new ways, directly to consumers. More specifically, retailing can create value and customer engagement, and stimulate new demand through new content and more relevant and tailored offers.

Personalization
  • Customers are expecting more personalization, more options to choose from, more relevant offers. Air France KLM group together with their NDC partners showcasing the strategic ambition to create personalized offer to customers through dynamic pricing for paid options and dynamic bundling.  Watch the video (March 2021).
Better customer experience
  • TripActions together with their Airline partner Lufthansa Group displaying more personalized experienced through bundles. Watch the video
    Highlight: High traveler demand for the seamless user experience NDC enables
  • The journey of onboarding NDC content within both B2B and B2C travel solutions. Egencia and their NDC partners on the benefits, challenges, rewards and progress of bringing NDC to market for their travellers, with Lufthansa Group producing NDC content. Download their presentation. (December 2019- BTN webinar).
    Highlight: Good UI interfaces are in place
Servicing
  • FCM Travel Solutions together with their IT partner Amadeus and ​the corporation Parexel on how NDC content from American Airlines ​can be compared and booked by a corporate traveler through the Amadeus Cytric Travel & Expense online booking tool.​ Read the use case and watch the video (June 2020).
    Highlight: NDC End to End flows with real value chain collaboration and full servicing.
New itineraries
  • Travelers demand more from their end-to-end travel experience and seek for seamless traveler experience. Singapore Airlines, Scoot, Amadeus, Navitaire, and Accounting Centre of China Aviation are the first to pilot IATA’s NDC and ONE Order live in production to deliver recommendations for the future of interlining. Read the use case (2020).

    Highlight: Airline portfolio strategy and interoperability across carriers to enlarge multi-brand offer & new itineraries.
End to end NDC capabilities
  • Corporate Travel Management (CTM) demonstrating the ability to: 
  1. Service NDC Booking
  2. Identify tailored offers process
  3. Process NDC Unused tickets Credits

 

“Making sure that NDC content is showing without friction, alongside other content and works across all booking, reporting and duty of care products, has been underwhelming for our clients. Because there is no user impact.”

Timmo Rol, Chief Product Officer AU/NZ, CTM

Highlight: “NDC standard version 21.3 is the product of a decade of learning and experimenting. The industry to moving to this version will bring in the next phase of scale in airline retailing across the industry.” By Timmo Rol, Chief Product Officer AU/NZ, CTM

Watch the TMC demo (April 2022).

Optimized Payment and Fulfillment

 

New methods of settlement between airlines and sellers
  • SAP is the first System Provider to demonstrate that their Settlement with Orders developments have a set of recognized capabilities to support the settlement of orders within the IATA BSP. According to SAP, ‘’it was easy to integrate Settlement with Orders in SAP portfolio. No additional development was necessary to achieve certification goals. It only involved the configuration of business processes and setting up integration adapters to fulfill the required IATA industry message standards’’.  Read more
 
  • The journey to Airline Retailing is about moving to a world of Offers and Orders. TMCs have been looking to enhance their services and improve their processes.

    Listen to how a Seller has implemented the SwO standard – Click Travel with their airline partner British Airways present how they take advantage of the standard and the IATA service.

    “For Click Travel, NDC did fit in perfectly with our strategy, but we were looking for another benefit of the program for the TMC, a process improvement, something that was driving an efficiency gain, reducing cost, reducing complexity. This is where Settlement with Orders came in.” Robin Smith, VP Platform engineering, TravelPerk. Watch this video