Op-Ed: American Airlines NDC Works for Corp. Agencies and Clients

There’s lots of speculation and uncertainty surrounding American Airlines’ plan to remove 40 percent of its lowest fares from legacy global distribution system channels that aren’t New Distribution Capability-connected. What does that 40 percent of fares mean exactly for customers, when will GDSs, travel management companies and online booking tools be ready, and will American NDC even work for corporate travel?

AmTrav can answer that last question based on our own experience shopping, selling and servicing American NDC content: It works for corporate travel—for the most part, really well. Here’s what we’ve seen, plus three ways American NDC could be even better for customers.

American NDC quickly and reliably returns the full array of flights and fares that they promise, including Main Plus and Main Select NDC bundles, plus codeshares like American-JetBlue flights, all with clients’ negotiated discounts applied.

AmTrav customers can book and hold American NDC bookings for pre-trip approvals. (Other services like Concur Travel’s Travelfusion connection are “instant ticketing,” but that’s not an NDC limitation.) And travelers can select their own seats—American NDC returns every seat option including Main Cabin and Extra and Preferred, with any AAdvantage status benefits reflected, and allows us to book and change those seats more fully and reliably than the old GDS seat map services.

With a few exceptions, servicing works well too. Bookers can apply unused NDC tickets to new NDC tickets to save money on new travel. Changing a trip—either before or after travel has begun—works, too, and in fact is better than the GDS because American calculates additional collections for us without the risk of debit memos.

Looking at the big picture, American Airlines gives AmTrav more than 90 percent of what we need for our customers’ managed travel needs, and the last bit is hardly insurmountable.

It would be unlike us, though, not to have at least a few suggestions for improvements, so here are three ways American NDC could be even better.

First, as alluded to earlier, American tickets issued via GDSs can’t be exchanged for new NDC tickets. AmTrav customers hold tens of thousands of live and unused American tickets, those tickets could migrate to NDC faster if we could exchange them for NDC tickets. Instead, come April 3, customers will have to pick between booking lower NDC fares or booking higher GDS fares with their GDS unused tickets applied. Given that 10 percent of AmTrav sales include an unused ticket exchange, this is going to create a frustrating situation for lots of shared Amtrav-American customers.

(Note: This point applies to United Airlines NDC too. United NDC doesn’t allow GDS tickets to be exchanged for NDC tickets, either.)

Second, along with servicing functionality for voluntary changes, American promises to add irregular operations servicing options like automatically applying weather waivers to trip change shopping and exchanges. We can’t wait for those … but in the meantime we’ll hope for good weather.

Third, additional clarity on the “special offers via American-owned channels” would be appreciated. We know it’s important to American to maintain that right, but we hope they use it sparingly. Corporate customers count on TMCs for content, control, visibility and service. For most of them, booking direct for just one supplier and just one trip component isn’t practical or optimal. To make customers worry that they have to shop multiple sites to confirm they’re getting the lowest fare is a big ask for some of American’s best customers.

Overall, American NDC works well enough right now, but we’re most excited for the future possibilities that have been unlocked. With the constraints of EDIFACT removed, we hope American continues to iterate aggressively and deliver increasingly better experiences for business travelers via NDC channels.

AmTrav’s Elliott McNamee www.businesstravelnews.com