Ai Editorial: NDC Interlining – far from being there?

3rd June, 2019

There are critical financial changes that come along with the adoption of NDC, IATA’s XML-based data transmission standard. Be it for no use of filed fares to no pro-rates to the creation of e-tickets (only goes away with the ONE Order implementation), a lot of areas are being evaluated as airlines look to control the offer.

But what about the handling of routing options, based on code share and interline pacts, to manage bookings on partner’s PSS? How is NDC interlining coming along? Without interline, NDC is incomplete, according to senior industry executive, Ian Tunnacliffe, who spoke about the same during the recently held Ai’s Ancillary Merchandising Conference in London.

Another attendee, Ann Cederhall, Senior Strategic Consultant at PROS, in a post on LinkedIn last week, stated: “Surprisingly there isn’t an NDC standard for selling interline between airlines, you would have thought that this was critical to traditional network carriers who sell other airlines and their content. Sadly, interline and codeshare seem to be rocket science in the NDC world.”

 

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