Robert Silk
ARC has established a working group geared toward developing best industry practices for the servicing and support of NDC-enabled airline ticket transactions.
It's an initiative that the travel advisor community should welcome.
The ongoing efforts by many airlines to persuade, or in some cases coerce, their agency partners into adopting NDC continue to rankle many travel advisors. Even agencies that have adopted and are booking through NDC report frequent challenges with post-ticketing servicing.
Nevertheless, the effort by airlines to drag travel agencies out of the legacy GDS world and into the NDC world can only be expected to intensify over time.
American, which is already pulling more than half of its fare content from legacy GDSs, has said its eventual goal is to be out of the legacy environment entirely. On May 1 the carrier will take its next major distribution-related step when it stops awarding AAdvantage miles and loyalty points for bookings via travel agencies that don't make at least 30% of their sales via NDC.
Meanwhile, United, which already distributes continuously priced fares via NDC that are not available through legacy channels, is leaving the door open to pulling additional legacy content following its removal last year of basic economy fares.
Other airlines big and small in the U.S. and abroad can also be expected to implement and increase GDS surcharges, remove legacy content and offer incentives for NDC-enabled bookings.
As such, the question for agencies accustomed to booking through legacy channels isn't if they are going to need to transition to NDC but rather how thorough the servicing and settlement functionality will be when they do so.
That's where ARC's NDC Advancement Working Group has the potential to be a difference-maker.
A fundamental discrepancy between NDC and legacy GDS bookings is that with NDC the airline controls the offer and services the order rather than the GDS. As a result, servicing protocols and capabilities are inconsistent from airline to airline.
In developing a set of best industry practices for NDC, ARC hopes to set a framework for smoothing over those inconsistencies. The airline-owned corporation has previously undertaken similar efforts with some success, including its 2018 publication of a best practices for debit memo resolution and prevention.
That document won praise at the time from Travel Weekly columnist and travel industry attorney Mark Pestronk, especially for its guidelines that airlines focus on better communication with agencies and that they respond to disputes within 30 days.
It's unclear from ARC data whether the standards have ultimately changed the debit memo landscape materially. The ratio of debit memos to overall airline/agency transaction volumes improved in the first complete year after the document was published, but the pandemic reset the playing field.
Still, Kathy Campbell, the director of Sabre corporate teams for Frosch Travel, said she believes the standards have helped.
"The information on the debit memos is a little clearer, and that helps when trying to figure out the issue," Campbell said.
At the NDC Advancement Working Group's first meeting last month, participants from airlines, technology providers and travel agencies identified three post-transaction focus points: unused tickets; notifications to agencies of passenger name record, or PNR, changes; and fare and void rules.
Over the remainder of this year and likely beyond, the group will work toward laying out standards for how airlines, agencies and technology providers should deal with those matters and others.
At the very least, developing such standards should be a step toward easing the current distribution tumult.
Correction: An earlier version of this article contained an incorrect byline and image; the article was written by Robert Silk.