It’s time to prepare the obituary for traditional air distribution’s EDIFACT technology, some airlines executives said during the UATP’s annual Airline Distribution Conference in recent weeks, although its run date is still far from certain.
“EDIFACT is going to sunset as a technology,” Air Canada managing director of customer digital and distribution Keith Wallis said at the conference in Vienna. “It is decades and decades old, and it is not fit for purpose anymore. It doesn’t allow airlines to do the content they want, and it doesn’t allow travel agents to get the content they want. Whether it happens in 2025 or over the next five to seven years, it will die a natural death.”
Indeed, several airlines at the conference reported significant progress in New Distribution Capability adoption. Finnair, one of the most aggressive carriers in shifting to NDC, remains on track to discontinuing support for EDIFACT content by the end of 2025. NDC also has been “pivotal” to the strategy of Hawaiian Airlines over the past few years, with about 60 percent of indirect volume now through NDC and growth to 75 percent expected through the end of the year, the carrier’s senior director of distribution George Bryan said. Via its aggregator, Hawaiian can “provide 95 percent of capabilities a [travel management company] or tour operator requires” with NDC content, according to Bryan.
Lufthansa Group head of distribution solutions Mario Maier acknowledged that it has been a “bumpy road” with NDC. “Should we have delivered more in content differentiation over the past few years? Yes,” Maier said. “Did we promise more than we delivered? Yes.”
Even so, the group is “happy where we are at the moment,” he said. Executives late last year said 2024 would be the “year of NDC for Lufthansa Group,” Maier said, with a “next-level NDC program” to be announced in the coming months. One of the main streams of that will be enhancing API servicing capabilities, which he said remains one of the biggest gaps in terms of covering corporate travel needs. Another stream will focus on offer management, with Lufthansa already piloting some bundles for both corporate and leisure travelers in the market.
“You’re going to see some brave moves in the upcoming months from Lufthansa Group,” Maier said. The group aims to be “full offer and order” sometime in the range of 2028 to 2030, according to Maier.
Eric Dumas, CEO of TPConnects—the tech company majority owned-by Flight Centre Travel Group, and which aggregates travel content, including NDC content and makes it available through a universal API—said it had about 1.5 million NDC bookings in 2023. That should “double or triple this year,” he said.
Spotnana, which was “built for NDC from day one,” continues to add NDC connections as well, with three airline companies—Emirates, Air France/KLM and British Airways—all in the final stages of connecting to the platform, Spotnana VP of business development for content distribution Johnny Thorsen said. One of the recently completed connections took just two days to complete, he said.
Amid all of those progress reports, however, Hudson Crossing partner Brian Clark had a little cold water to toss. Airlines that have made distinct progress with NDC are currently in a solid minority.
“There are 400 to 450 airlines in the world that matter,” Clark said. “At this point, maybe 60 have started down the path of NDC, and only a smaller subset of those are really, truly exercising the APIs that are out there.”
Germany’s Hahnair, which provides distribution and ticketing services for hundreds of partner carriers, sees a variety of progress among those carriers, Hahnair CEO Kirsten Rehmann said. “Some are defining their strategy, and some are further ahead,” she said. “It’s defining the strategy, defining the needs and identifying the gaps—and there are many gaps.”
The need to work with agency technology is one of those gaps, she said. On the agency side, while new technology built with NDC standards in mind like Spotnana can execute NDC integration in a matter of days, the reality for most agencies is still a process of “years, not weeks or months,” Clark said.
“Large agencies are rooted and seeded … in the GDS,” he said. “They’re using the GDS PNRs for inventory management, back offices, inventory, stores, customer profiles. If you’re an agency, and the strategy is, now I have to be flexible, now you need to take that back, and extracting all of that—if it’s not a heart transplant, it’s certainly a liver transplant.”
As such, while the “challenge for content” will continue, the end of EDIFACT is not likely to happen in the near future, said Ray Pazerekas, Concur Travel Suppliers regional vice president for the Americas.
“Legacy technology isn’t going anywhere, and moving away from legacy technology isn’t all that easy,” Pazerekas said. “Looking at some proof points, Southwest Airlines, after years and years of API-only, moved into GDSs because they felt like they were missing out on sales opportunities. Delta Air Lines, the largest carrier by far in terms of corporate travel, continues to be an EDIFACT carrier.”
Those agencies, however, will still need to find ways around EDIFACT as there are more “sharp turns” for airlines in distribution policy, such as American Airlines’ loyalty restrictions and “preferred agency” status announced earlier this year, Dumas said. “Your product, which is an airline experience, you need to be able to have the freedom to sell to who you want,” he said. “This can be done only by using modern technology.”
The new technology entrants haven’t necessarily written off EDIFACT as dead either, as Spotnana is “not anti-GDS,” and in fact “relies heavily on Sabre” and supports Sabre EDIFACT, Thorsen said. Sabre and Spotnana in the past six months have had conversations on how to “accelerate together” toward evolution, he said.
“It’s a good example of a player that has been in an old business model for a long time also evolving into a new marketplace,” according to Thorsen. “We can innovate together, but it still relies on the airlines to define what they want and change the business models with the TMC.”
As such, the final prognosis for EDIFACT via the UATP conference seemed to be a bit more life left but decreasing usefulness.
That comes as the world of corporate airline negotiations is changing as well, evolving for toward “a tiered program” with fare brands created around corporation’s specific needs for their travelers. In the vein, EDIFACT was not the only long-standing corporate travel entity on death watch at the conference.”
“We have our sales team sit down and talk to our closest corporate clients,” Wallis said. “The world where Air Canada is not offering discounts to corporate travel is coming. That is not a bad thing; help us be a close partner and create a corporate travel program where you are attracting the best talent.”
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