NDC, Aggregation, and the Commercial Reality

NDC, Aggregation, and the Commercial Reality

NDC was meant to modernise airline distribution. What it is actually doing is reshaping the commercial model.

That stability the industry relied on is gone. Airlines are now using distribution as a commercial lever. Surcharges, exclusive fares, bundles, and channel bias are now standard.

And it is working.

We are seeing a clear rise in NDC transactions across clients and markets. Not incremental growth. Real shifts in where bookings are flowing.

There is an obvious irony.

NDC is not new. What has changed is intent. Airlines are no longer waiting for adoption. They are forcing it through pricing and content control.

That creates a problem for everyone else.

• If you cannot access the right content, you lose conversion.
• If you cannot compare it properly, you lose margin.
• If you cannot service it, you increase cost.

There is another issue.

For aggregation to work, airlines need to support consistent search behaviour across all channels. Today, that is not always the case.

The same search can return different availability, pricing, and bundles depending on the channel. That breaks the foundation of aggregation.

You are not comparing like for like. You are comparing interpretations.

That has real commercial impact. This is where most platforms struggle.

Pulling content together is no longer enough.

Under NDC, that creates noise, distorts margin, and increases servicing cost.

This is the gap between aggregation and true aggregation. Aggregation is not a one-off integration. It is a continuous investment.

The first NDC carrier we integrated was British Airways direct. The build was only part of it. The real cost has been ongoing support, schema changes, and keeping parity across sources.

Every airline behaves differently. Keeping it aligned is a moving target.

But this is where the upside sits.

Done properly, NDC is a margin opportunity — more dynamic pricing, richer ancillaries, more revenue in each booking.

But only if it is aggregated, normalised, and optimised properly. Otherwise, it drives more complexity, more cost, and less control.

This is the next phase of competition.

Not who connects to the most sources. Who can turn those sources into a commercially optimised, consistent offer.

NDC volumes will keep rising. The question is simple.

Does your platform turn that into margin, or let it erode it?