A lively discussion on the development of NDC, where Aer Lingus said they would not be seeking visibility of agents’ customer base, was among the highlights of last week’s annual conference of the Irish Travel Agents Association.
A the conference in Almería, Aisling Murphy of Aer Lingus emphasised the airline’s commitment to supporting travel partners through feedback gathered at previous workshops, highlighting the importance of understanding customer needs as they transition to NDC.
The lively panel discussion, with audience engagement, discussed how NDC represents a significant opportunity for collaboration within the industry. Emphasis was placed on moving away from legacy technology and the need for a streamlined process for both booking and servicing.
Aer Lingus announced plans to conduct further workshops to facilitate discussions with trade partners and address concerns. The two speakers form the airline said they want to ensure every segment can reach its full potential without competition among them.
Speakers from Amadeus and Paxport highlighted the need for differentiation in airline offerings, showcasing examples of creative pricing strategies and stressing that successful implementation of NDC requires a focus on both functionality and servicing for a seamless customer experience.
Aisling Murphy of Aer Lingus gave the main presentation of the session: One of the most important messages that I wanted to try and convey today is that our objective is to support our travel partners. In January 2022, we had a trade workshop with our partners, and we had almost 100 members of the trade attend. What we did throughout that session was gather information in terms of what’s the most important functionality to you and to your business when it comes to NDC. Is it ticking time limits? Is it having that order change application functionality? Is it having your corporate RS? We used that to inform our roadmap for NDC, so we’re really taking all of your feedback on board in terms of what works for you.
I want to just reiterate the fact that as Aer Lingus, one of the flag carriers in Ireland, we are open and committed to working with you. I have an NDC team based in Dublin that is happy to come out and talk to any of you regarding the best connection opportunities in terms of what might suit your business model, and anything really that you want to know about NDC. Because at the end of the day, this is an industry transformation, and it’s going to involve collaboration from us all. Any sort of information that you need around your NDC journey, we’re more than happy to help.
At the end of the day, change is daunting, and I know the concept of NDC has been around for quite a while, but COVID has really forced us to think about the way in which we retail our products and send messages to each other.
B2C transformation has really taken effect over the last 10 years in terms of over-bundling, personalisation, and trying to get to know our customers. But on the B2B side, we’re still using legacy technology to transmit messages to each other. So NDC is really an opportunity for us all to work closer together and bridge the gap in terms of information and retailing.
So at Aer Lingus, there are a number of different ways to access our content, first being aerlingus.com and our mobile app. I’m fully aware that all of you in this room have different business models, so whatever way works best for you in terms of accessing our content, we are open to working and supporting you on that journey. If aerlingus.com works for your business, we are thrilled to have you come through our direct channels.
With NDC and our B2B API, the advantage of having that technology is actually in the backend booking management. Being able to see all of the bookings that you’ve created with Aer Lingus in one space and manage those bookings is a really, really important factor in NDC. Versus our web channel, Aer Lingus’ best content is on our direct channels. Also, the ability to add ancillaries, to check in online, and again, enhancing that overall customer experience, making sure they have all the information available to them and that we can provide them with the most up-to-date operational information, etc., and manage those customers end to end.
Yvonne Muldoon of Aer Lingus old the conference: NDC is the starting point in this innovation. What’s happening in the background on the back of NDC is actually something called offer and order. Airlines are actually getting together now and realising that we’ve come to an agreement on NDC standards. We could do the same for our reservation systems; we could do the same for how we sell to each other.
So there’s lots of work going on in the background in terms of airline reservation systems and in terms of the way that we sell other airlines to make that even more optimal, to be able to include other airlines, and more importantly, to be able to easily service cross-airlines. So in the next five years, you’re going to see a lot of work happening in that space. I know our partners in British Airways have just recently announced a big lot of work going on there onboarding to the Nexus platform.
So, really interesting to see how the industry moves forward and what happens there again to alleviate the pain of interconnecting and those complex journeys as well. So, yeah, really, really exciting times, and NDC is only just start, and we’re looking to completely evolve the end-to-end ecosystem.
At the moment, our functionality is around, I suppose, the booking side from instant pay but also the serviceability. As we came out of COVID, what we saw as really, really important functionality that we’re getting from our trade partners is servicing. It’s so important as we move to NDC because having NDC without servicing just isn’t going to work. So we focused on building that component. What we’re building at the moment is that delay ticketing functionality, is that corporate fares, is that private fares functionality. As soon as we have that in place and move to the 21.3 standard as well—which is very key—we’re hoping to do that hopefully in the first half of 2025.
I’m hoping they’ll be starting to talk about the likes of offer and order management systems, and that’s really understanding your customer when you’re sending them back the offer.
So even the likes of being able to connect into our trade partners so that they can tell us, actually, this is a passenger traveling for business. They’d be more interested in the corporate-type fares or the bundle-type fares than, let’s say, your leisure-type fares. So even that side of getting to know your customer and being able to personalise offers would be essential and to start talking about it next year.
Then equally, how do we report that in an order? Again, moving away from the legacy technology and reservation systems..
We will start to unlock the likes of Amadeus, Travelport, and Sabre, but the most challenging part for a lot of airlines has actually been reaching the NDC agreement. We’re very lucky to be part of the IAG group and to have those three agreements in place. So to me, the next phase is actually the exciting phase, and that’s lining up all of our DOS, making sure we’ve got all of the aligned functions and making it work for everybody.
We don’t want to launch something before all of the functionality is there. We want to have the best possible experience and make that transition easy. I would hope that at some stage in 2025, we’ll be able to announce specific timelines around that. We’re also looking to have in quarter one this year another trade workshop to bring everybody together and to hear feedback—what you need, what you’ve heard about NDC, or what you want to know more about.
I think with the workshop we had a conversation about a year ago and we say there is—I don’t say a knowledge gap, but there was a nervousness around what was happening within the industry. We thought, “Okay, we can either hide, or we can actually enable that conversation.” We can have some learnings and listen to our trade partners. A lot of the partners that were in the room at the time were either on our B2B API or were actually quite advanced in their stage of coming on board our NDC journey.
What we will do is work with the sales team in Ireland—through Jenny Rafter and Ivan Beacom and their team. We will certainly reach out, and through the ITAA, of course, we’ll send out some notifications
We had a session in Dublin last year with 100 people or so. We can have 200, we can have 300— we’re more than happy to open up the hangar. Please come in, and let’s have that really healthy debate and understand what your requirements are so we can keep on adapting accordingly.
We know that the likes of TTL is important to you; we know corporate fares managing is all on the roadmap. It was really beneficial for the distribution team to listen to a lot of our key trade partners. Because, actually, out of that session we were able to look at the roadmap and constantly consult the sales team to say, “Okay, do you think we need to put TTL Interops ahead of potentially corporate route deal fares. Where do we need to go with the prioritisation? So having that continuous engagement is really important.
Listen, if we were trying to steal customers, we wouldn’t be here today. I can tell you now, we are not stealing anyone’s customers.
If you think of the evolution of Aer Lingus going from a state airline to being owned by IAG in 2015, we’ve got a high penetration—that’s the nature of the Irish market.
We work with OTAs, we work with tour operators, and we work with every segment of the business. We kind of want to work in parallel and grow; each segment shouldn’t be in competition with each other. So the way we look at the segmentation for business, we think every segment should be able to reach its full potential in a parallel process.
So we’re open to working with all trade partners, and that’s why when we had a conversation with Claire and Angela about coming to the ITAA conference, we wanted to open up this debate. We felt it was a really pivotal time to actually have this conversation so that there is no room for confusion. Aer Lingus is a supporter of the trade.
Any help that we can bring through that process—through workshops, through engagement, you know, the door is open.
I know the question comes up around content quite a lot, and I want to reassure everybody again that we have no immediate plans to change any of our content. What we want to focus on instead is empowering you through your journey to get to NDC and make that change as well. I know there have been a lot of different announcements around content, etc., in the market have made people quite nervous over the last few years, but again, just to reassure you, we want to be here to help you on the way, and we want to make sure that you have what you need to be able to onboard. Our sales and distribution teams work really, really closely together.
Clare de Bono of Amadeus told the conference: The big thing really is about acceleration of what we’ve been doing and then focusing on adoption. The airlines have really begun to give us a lot of differentiated content, things which are really quite special. We’re seeing some airlines do…
I think we’d like to see really more in terms of differentiation. We’re seeing some fare differentiation, I showed you that, but there’s also some creative things that certain airlines are doing. For example, you can see three fare cards. I’ve seen certain airlines implement things like it costs $50 to book a seat, and if you book two seats, it’s $90. So it’s some creative things to do with pricing and meal inclusion, being able to enrich the offer with some really quite clever and exciting things which can bring that rich retailing to life.
And just so, more and more on adoption and talking to you guys to the point where it begins to feel normal.
Caryn Bishop of Paxport told the conference: On our platform, so you don’t have to go into portals. That is a big block up for the uptake, as some of our customers wanting to use NDC say they haven’t got complete functionality of how to manage that. I think most of the airlines would agree that they’re quite guilty. Their journey with NDC was always just about booking—just get the content out there. For the uptake, it’s got to be about servicing and managing. That’s what we, as the middleman, are doing; we’re taking all that feedback and doing what we can with the airlines. Where there is a shortfall, our technology tries to bridge that.
Sean Healy, Maureen Delmar and Colette Murphy
