Episode 5 of the series “My NDC is better than yours”
More than ten years. That's how long it's been since IATAlaunched the NDC standard. Ten years of conferences, white papers, ambitious roadmaps, and certifications announced with great fanfare. Ten years during which NDC has been presented as the answer to everything: personalization, rich content, disintermediation, and modern retailing.
And yet. On the ground, in 2026, the promise remains largely incomplete. Agents are still juggling multiple systems. Travel managers are still operating with incomplete data. Aggregators are spending months integrating APIs, airline by airline, that should have been standardized.
So, who is responsible? The technology? The standard? IATA?
The answer is more uncomfortable than that. The problem isn't technical. It's systemic. And until we clearly state this, the NDC will continue to move forward but won't truly arrive.
Summary
A real adoption… but a superficial one
On paper, the NDC is progressing. IATA certification figures are increasing. Airlines are announcing growing NDC volumes. Press releases are coming one after another.
But let's dig a little deeper.
The majority of NDC transactions currently in production run on older versions of the 17.2 and 18.2 standards with limited functionality. Searching works. Booking works too, in simple cases. But what about after-sales service? Dynamic pricing? Advanced corporate offers? Full management of ancillary services? This is where the veneer cracks, and it largely depends on the airline. But let's be honest, we're lucky in France, because our main airline, Air France, is the most advanced, the most stable, and the most comprehensive, even if we would have liked to have 100% of our wish lists checked off.
NDC is often "present" in systems without being fully operational. It's like saying you speak English because you know how to order a coffee. Technically true. Commercially insufficient.
This gap between communication and reality on the ground has a cost: it fosters mistrust among agents, fuels skepticism among travel managers, and provides ammunition to those who prefer to stick with the GDS. Not because the GDS is better, but because it's well-known, stable, and predictable.
The weight of legacy and contracts
To understand why the NDC is progressing so slowly, we need to look at what airlines never show in their presentations: their internal constraints.
The PSS first.
The Passenger Service System (PSS) is the central system that manages an airline's inventory, reservations, and fares. Most major carriers run on PSSs designed in the 1980s or 1990s, maintained by Amadeus Altea, Sabre SynXis, or aging in-house systems. These systems are not "NDC-native." NDC is grafted on as an additional layer, not deeply integrated. Migrating a PSS is a 3- to 5-year project, costing hundreds of millions of euros, and involves considerable operational risk that few airlines are willing to take, so migration is avoided or postponed. No one undertakes it lightly.
Next, the GDS contracts.
Airlines have signed multi-year agreements with GDSs that often include content obligations—in other words, a commitment to maintain a certain volume of fares available in the GDS. These clauses, negotiated before the NDC existed, now create real legal constraints. Removing content from the GDS to reserve it for the NDC is a potential violation of these agreements. Some airlines have done so openly, with the Lufthansa Group leading the way. Others are proceeding more cautiously, caught between their NDC ambitions and their contractual obligations.
Economic balance at last.
GDSs still represent a very significant portion of distribution revenue for most airlines. A sudden shift to NDC risks losing booking volume before NDC distribution is mature enough to compensate. As one distribution professional told me, "I wouldn't risk losing even 1% of my volume." It's a delicate balancing act: innovating without disrupting existing systems, differentiating without unbalancing channels, and modernizing without challenging established models.
In this context, the “timid” NDC that many observe on the ground is not due to ill will. It is often a matter of risk management.
A transformation that no one really wants to take responsibility for
This is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable.
The NDC is not a technical evolution. It is a transformation of the entire airline distribution model. It involves a shift from ticketing to order-based logic, a profound paradigm shift in how an airline transaction is built, stored, and managed. It implies the end of static fares and the introduction of dynamic pricing (incredibly powerful in terms of agility), which challenges years of pricing practices. It implies a redistribution of value between airlines, GDSs, aggregators, and travel agencies.
However, each of these actors has something to lose in this redistribution.
GDSs have built empires on the current distribution model. They are adapting (despite themselves) to the NDC, they have no choice but they have no interest in accelerating its adoption to the point of making their own model obsolete (this is also why sometimes we see somewhat schizophrenic attitudes from some GDSs).
Large agencies and TMCs have invested heavily in GDS integrations, processes, training, tools, and more. Changing requires reinvestment. And reinvesting in a technology that is still rapidly evolving is a risky gamble that many prefer to postpone.
Aggregators play a key role, but their proliferation also creates fragmentation. Each aggregator implements NDC in its own way, with its own technical choices, its own company priorities, and its own compromises. As a result, agencies that thought they were finding a unified solution sometimes find themselves with added complexity. And we haven't even mentioned connectivity to SBTs/OBTs yet.
No one really benefits from a sudden break. So the NDC moves forward, but in a fragile balance, at the speed of the slowest, in a system where the incentives for the status quo are stronger than the incentives for change.
The question the industry avoids
There's one question that no one really asks at industry conferences, between two cocktails and three optimistic keynotes: do airlines really want the NDC they claim to want?
Because fully deployed NDC means more control for companies over their distribution—and that's what they want. But it also means greater transparency for agencies and customers regarding pricing conditions. It challenges opaque yield management practices. It potentially means less flexibility in adjusting prices based on the distribution channel, but this issue is likely to be quickly resolved by the "transparent" nature of electronic invoicing.
In other words: the NDC gives companies what they want on the surface, but in return demands a transparency and consistency that they are not always willing to assume.
And from the agencies' perspective, the question is symmetrical: do they truly want a model where their added value no longer lies in exclusive access to content, but in their ability to advise, personalize, and build loyalty? Some do. Others subconsciously prefer a world where the complexity of distribution makes them indispensable, and above all, where the cryptic world of black screens never disappears, even if this complexity either exhausts or suits them.
The risk of facade NDC
This is the scenario that no one wants to officially consider, but which awaits the industry if it does not take responsibility: the facade NDC.
An NDC used as a marketing ploy ("we're NDC-ready") without any real process transformation. An NDC deployed as an additional channel, without streamlining existing channels. An NDC that adds complexity without removing friction.
In this scenario, the promises of retailing remain partial. Fragmentation between companies is becoming entrenched. Agents find themselves with one more tool to manage, not one less, except for those who understood that they needed to choose a next-generation tool, one built from the ground up, not one that has always existed and clings to its historical model, with the same tools behind supposedly redesigned screens. We are, it must be said openly, in a period of enormous change, and it is here that those who make the right decisions will gain an advantage over the others; the future will tell us the outcome.
This is not a theoretical hypothesis. It is what we are already observing, partially, among certain actors who have ticked the NDC box without having taken responsibility for its depth.
Key takeaways
The NDC is not a failure. But it is not, in 2026, the revolution we were promised, but we are getting closer and closer, and we cannot keep postponing certain structural choices.
The real issue isn't the version of the standard. Nor even the quality of the technology. It's the ability of the entire ecosystem—airlines, GDSs, aggregators, agencies, TMCs, SBTs/OBTs—to evolve in a coordinated manner, with each party accepting some sacrifices so that the system as a whole becomes more efficient.
Without this, the risk is clear: seeing the NDC remain an incomplete innovation in a system that has not really changed.
The technology is ready. The question is whether the players and actors are.
Read more about the NDC in tourism
NDC: the standard that isn't really a standard
NDC and Corporate: the major upheaval
"My NDC is better than yours": The airlines' battle over NDC
NDC: What this changes in concrete terms for tourism professionals
Qantas and Navan: an NDC alliance that redefines business travel
