Our pilot project with Trip.com and a partner airline on the NDC Offer Repository gives us confidence that the NDC scalability challenges related to top-of-the-funnel searches can be overcome for the benefit of online travel agents (OTAs), metasearch engines (MSEs), airlines and, of course, travelers.
The NDC Offer Repository in brief
The NDC Offer Repository aims at being an industry-based solution, built around a cloud-based evolution of NDC, away from its current shape as a primarily transactional standard. It will enhance airlines’ presence with Digital Travel Players (DTPs) at the inspiration stage of the traveler journey by allowing airlines to put their offers into a repository, on their terms and within their control.
OTAs and Metasearch engines may respond to traveler search queries by accessing a repository of NDC-based offers, rather than polling the airline’s core IT systems which generates a significant volume of transactions.
As the traveler progresses through the search funnel and chances of conversion increase, the (DTPs) would seamlessly switch back to a conventional NDC flow.
Background
IATA first introduced the scalability challengein a2019 report . Amadeus and IATA collaborated on a follow-up project, in 2022, which drilled down into thespecifics of low intent to book, top-of-the-funnel searches and introduced the NDC Offer Repository to the world.
IATA “aspirational goal” of 100% NDC by 2030 -part of its industry vision for offers and orders – creates a working deadline for this top-of-the-funnel pain point to be alleviated. Over the same timeframe, the global reach of the digital travel players will extend even further, driven by their compelling direct-to-consumer travel proposition.
Without a fit-for-purpose industry standard, airlines and DTPs will miss out on significant revenues, while travelers will feel frustrated that they are not being shown all the available options.
Hence the need for the NDC Offer Repository.
The Proof of Concept pilot project
For the partner airline and Trip.com Proof of Concept which ran in a production environment, the airline’s NDC offers on specific city pairs were pre-computed and stored into the NDC Offer Repository. When Trip.com customers searched for one of these city pairs, the results came directly from the offer repository, when eligible, instead of targeting the airline’s NDC IT system.
Both the airline and the OTA saw a number of upsides during the project, with no immediately recognisable negatives. Within the specific guardrails, the proof of concept succeeded in several areas.
- 40% polling offload gain
By adding its content to NDC Offer Repository, the airline saw a 40% reduction in the number of times its core systems were polled. This materially reduced its processing costs, thanks to less computation energy used for supplying the same level of offers, and could play an important role towards sustainability targets and greener IT.
- 30% quicker response times
The NDC Offer Repository will be cloud-based and architected to be compatible with other solutions currently on the market and under development. For the proof of concept, we used the repository with Amadeus MasterPricer and saw a 30% improvement in how quickly search results were returned to users, for searches on the partner airline content, compared with response time from the processes used today.
- Added value through added innovation
A polling decision model was applied, to target the top-of-the-funnel searches: The model recognized whether a trip.com search was best handled by the repository or whether it was more appropriate for it to be directed to the airline’s core system.
- Conversion rates stable
Across the duration of the project, there was no negative impact on conversion rates, validating the repository’s ability to improve some prescribed processes within the flow without compromising others.
Positive outcomes all round
A fit-for-purpose evolution of the NDC standard to deal with top-of-the-funnel searches will come with benefits for all key actors in the industry:
- Access to NDC content is unlocked, allowing travel sellers to keep on inspiring the travelers with great response time thanks to a broad and accurate range of content made available at their fingertips
- Airline presence will be reinforced with NDC content available at all stages of the traveler journey, and with offers that remain in their control
- DTPs can build loyalty by giving travelers the confidence that their DTP of choice has access to content. Adoption of the NDC Offer Repository – especially in a crowded market - is a vital step on this journey to improved customer retention and acquisition in the future.
Yudong TAN, CEO of Flight Business Group, Trip.com Group, said:
“As one of the leading digital players in the market, we’ve direct experience of the scalability challenges for NDC at the travel inspiration stage. We engaged with Amadeus from the outset of this pilot project and we’re delighted at the outcome at this early stage. We will continue to support industry efforts and initiatives to develop a solution which benefits OTAs and MSEs, helps our airline partners and improves the search and shop experience for travelers."
Next steps
Working with Trip.com and a partner airline – in a live environment - over a period of four months yielded a series of positive proof points. The results are sufficiently encouraging for use to scale this initial PoC with other partners. Amadeus is also working on alternative iterations of the concept.
Amadeus is committed to supporting airlines and travel sellers to adopt modern retailing strategies at every touchpoint and is well on the way to helping our customers fulfil the potential of NDC. We are aware that many stakeholders – airlines, DTPs and IATA – need to work together in a way that benefits the entire industry. As a result, we are calling on all members of the ecosystem to get involved with the IATA working groups and to come up with more collaborative industry-based proposals.
The NDC scalability challenge at the travel inspiration stage is already here, as is the potential solution.
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