CAPA Live. Qantas: paused in NDC rollout but robust roadmap ahead

At CAPA Live on 10-Feb-2021, Qantas’ head of distribution, Nadine Dawood Morgan, explained that the airline’s NDC deployment had been paused due to the changed priorities as the pandemic upended operations.

In Aug-2019, Qantas and Travelport enjoyed a key milestone in their NDC (New Distribution Capability) journeys, but that was in a very different environment.

At that time, as a key part in its continuing support for Qantas’ NDC, Travelport began handling its first bookings with the Australian flag carrier using IATA’s NDC standard.

This NDC connection to Qantas was a first by any GDS to the airline and enabled live bookings of NDC content to be made by selected agency partners taking part in the testing programme, ahead of a rollout to the wider agency community in subsequent months.

The development is part of the airline’s plans for the Qantas Distribution Platform (QDP), a dedicated offering to deliver improved customer experience through enhanced and personalised content tailored to meet travellers’ needs.

It may not have been the first airline live NDC booking via the GDS – that happened back in Oct-2018 – but it had represented a key moment for both parties, and a first in the Asia Pacific region, in an NDC story that is now closing on its tenth year.

However, the world now looks very different, and the question raised at CAPA Live was: is NDC transitioning helping or hindering air transport’s recovery?