ACCORDING TO AMON AMON COHEN
A 3D REVOLUTION FOR DISTRIBUTION? I
THERE IS AN INCREASING NEED TO GET TO GRIPS WITH NDC – AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
may be 51, but every time I am forced to visit a garden centre, my inner 13-year-old instantly
reappears. I grudgingly let myself be led around, shuffling my feet and muttering “boring” under my breath, until finally I’m allowed back in the car for the drive home.
I wonder if travel managers have similar feelings about IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC)? The name is so dreary that even the prospect of listening to BBC Radio 4’s Money Box Live dubbed into Flemish sounds marginally more enticing. This may explain why a study by IATA’s new “envoy” to corporate clientdom, Paul Tilstone, finds few buyers have properly assessed what NDC will likely mean for them. If you fall into this camp, I would suggest it’s time to unglaze your eyes, because NDC is important. An IATA survey of 178 airlines earlier this year revealed that 73 of them were “actively working on their adoption” of NDC standards. The finding supports IATA’s claim that airlines are poised to move beyond their pilot tests to fully launched NDC-based selling. And even if they don’t adopt NDC, carriers will find other ways to fulfil the standards’ essential intention: offering a similar internet-style shopping experience through indirect sales channels – such as travel management companies (TMCs) and corporate booking
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
tools – to what airlines already sell directly to passengers on their own websites. Tilstone’s research also
revealed that buyers feel TMCs, booking tools and the like are failing to communicate how NDC will transform their services. My reading is that intermediaries are still determining whether NDC poses them a threat or an opportunity, and how both they and other businesses (not just direct competitors) will harness its potential. The likely consequences of NDC are hard to plot because it is not a clearly defined sales, distribution or purchasing method. It’s a toolkit for players in the distribution chain, all the way from the airline to the corporate buyer, to create their own selling or buying strategies. One analogy is the invention of 3D printing. The printer manufacturers make the printers – but it’s other
I would suggest it’s time to unglaze your eyes, because NDC is important
businesses that are discovering where the technology can take them. That process of discovery is spawning a wide variety of applications, from the benign (I read of vets who have printed a prosthetic beak for a maimed sea turtle) to the malign (printing guns) to the deeply transformational (a Chinese company “printing” entire houses for around £3,000 a time).
Of course, NDC is not a second industrial revolution, as has been claimed for 3D printing, but it will shake up business travel, including negotiated airline agreements. One development could be the inclusion of ancillary items in preferred deals for the first time. More profoundly, corporate deals may start to define the channel through which the client’s travellers book their discounted seats. Whether that channel would still need all three intermediaries typically involved today – a global distribution system, a TMC and a booking tool provider – is questionable. At least one of those might conceivably be left out, and new distribution players, perhaps from sectors outside travel, could offer new options. That said, don’t write off
today’s corporate travel service providers. NDC could improve their service if they respond smartly. Instead, as I warned earlier this year, it is the travel manager who could be left out. For example, NDC might enable online leisure travel agents to target your travellers even more persuasively than in the past. Change is definitely in the air.
Amon Cohen is a specialist business travel writer, conference moderator and media trainer.
BBT JULY/AUGUST 2015
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Illustration: Ben Southan
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