Most travellers think in terms of reservations, tickets, boarding passes – but what makes this possible is in fact the Passenger Name Record (PNR) that gets created at the time of booking. It is not an understatement to say that PNR’s are the lifeblood of air travel, because they hold the complete details of a…
Part two of this blog series takes a deeper look at the technical and cultural challenges that airlines are currently grappling with as part of their NDC and ONE Order plans. As an introduction, part one summarised where we see NDC adoption today and some of the obstacles that remain, while part three focusses on some of…
Air travel is still in growth mode with 9.8 billion passenger journeys made in 2025, and additional 800 new routes added across the globe. As part of its annual assessment, IATA concludes that average air fares have fallen by $44 making air travel more accessible to more travellers but also adding to the pressure on…
IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) provides long-awaited standardization for airline dynamic shopping, retail & ancillary revenue generation. It represents a unique opportunity to modernise how air travel is sold, opening up the opportunities for airlines to become more profitable by selling not just seats, but unbundled options such as wifi, lounge access, seat and menu…
There are encouraging signs that the ambition of merchandising analytics helping airlines master retailing is not just a pipe dream but inching closer to a real and achievable vision. Industry execs around the globe seem to be in agreement that levelling the playing field between the direct and the indirect channel and creating an infrastructure…
Matching a specific product to the profile of a passenger is a fascinating exercise and increasingly necessary to drive profit. It’s exciting to know how the world of IT solutions, data, analytics, and even schemas all can come together to make a flyer feel special. Of course, if an airline knows what my intent is…
There can be no doubt that NDC is beginning to take flight, but more like a jumbo in a lumbering sort of way, held back originally by scepticism and vested interests and now by the scale of airline transformation required. The complexity of airline distribution, the constraints of decades old legacy systems and the interdependency…
Hotel distribution is complex and margin management is vital. It’s complex because hoteliers need to get the word out as far and wide as possible about their available inventory – before the opportunity to make money out of it perishes, literally. Waiting for people to visit brand.com is one option, but in today’s global competitive…
Data can be an invaluable resource for hoteliers, but many don’t consider the challenges that are involved in implementing and analyzing it. When it comes to hotel-specific data, there is a great deal of valuable information available that can be leveraged. This data can be cultivated from an operations perspective, as well as from distribution…
In this series of blogs on NDC Shopping Analytics we have taken a closer look at the: -Emerging Traveller / Airline customer relationship-Customer journey to conversion-Value of analysing searches as well as bookings-Role that PNR analytics can play in customer personalisation We conclude this series with a brief look at Electronic Miscellaneous Documents (EMDs) and…