Content distribution NDC is just one way to display
J
orge Elliott has been at Amadeus for 18 years, working mainly on airline distribution and strategy. He was previously head of the team negotiating
distribution agreements with airlines, then moved to the Amadeus travel content sourcing team within the Travel Channels division in January to work on commercial strategy and implementation. He describes Amadeus’ perspective
saying: “We start from the traveller and the traveller’s expectations. “Consumers are used to different ways of
buying and the industry has to adapt. That is what the airlines are doing.” Everybody talks about the fragmentation
of content in distribution. He says: “The fragmentation is not just from full content of airlines to not full [limited] content, or the fragmentation between full-service and low-cost carriers. The offer of the airlines is also evolving. “Traditionally, the choice for an airline
passenger was between business or economy and private or public search. But airlines have evolved their offer to offer components, access to a lounge, inflight Wi-Fi and so on. It is not that content was available and is not there anymore. Content has become more granular and difficult to search.” Elliott argues: “A traveller who knows
what they want will go direct to the airline. A traveller who goes to an agency wants to
FIGURE 21: SCHEDULED AIRLINE PASSENGERS, BY REGION
% of global market, 2018 Middle East 5.1%
America 6.9%
Latin
America 22.6%
Europe 26.2%
Source: Iata North
Pacific 37.1%
Asia- Africa 2.1% UK
Germany Spain
France Italy
Netherlands 80m
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 Passengers (million)
Source: Eurostat/CAA 162m 144m
222m 221m
292m
Content fragmentation dominates airline distribution. Jorge Elliott, Amadeus executive vice- president for travel content sourcing, sees a way forward
THE UK is Europe’s biggest aviation market (Figure 22) and
Europe the world’s second-largest regional market (Figure 21)
shop and wants to compare. But aggregated content becomes more and more difficult to compare. Airlines offer more classes and more and more complexity and it is more of a challenge to compare. “This trend will not stop. The main
challenge is how to search and compare options. That is what we are trying to build. We are aggregating all content – air, hotels, all different content – from multiple sources and presenting it to make search possible, so customers can compare. “That is the challenge. That is what
we are building with our Amadeus Travel Platform. From a technology perspective this is more complex than it looks. It’s a major investment.”
New Distribution Capability Amadeus is well advanced in developing New Distribution Capability (NDC) technology with partner airlines and travel agencies, including some major travel management companies (TMCs). NDC is the Iata standard for this
technology. But Elliott says: “For us, NDC is just one of the ways in which content could be displayed. Moving forward, we could get content from any source – from aggregators, from APIs [application programming interfaces] as well as airlines. The way we see the future, we could aggregate the aggregators in Amadeus.
EU AIR TRAFFIC, 2018
Major markets FIGURE 22:
% change YoY +10%
+5% +5%
+7% +5%
+5%
Travel Weekly Europe Report 2019 | 13
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