These were some of the questions discussed during sessions at the Airline Distribution 2026 conference last week. Below, we’ve shared some of the key insights, thoughts and concerns from airlines and technology specialists at the UATP-hosted event.
The customer decides
Airlines have been striving to increase direct sales in recent years while simultaneously trying to improve how they become better retailers through technology such as the NDC standard. Depending on who you ask, airlines attract about 60% of their sales via direct channels, but is there a perfect mix?
“We have 750,000 seats in the air every single day flying between all kinds of different markets. If any airline out there could fill every seat on every flight within their own channels and that was going to work and that’s where customers were going to buy, we would do that. But that’s not the world that exists,” said Neil Geurin, VP of sales for American Airlines.
He added that the direct business is about 55% currently but that it “ebbs and flows” with the indirect channel, and that mix is probably likely to remain the same for a while.
At United Airlines, 70% is direct today, according to Anthony Toth, managing director of digital sales for the carrier. The remainder consists of 10% via NDC but non-global distribution systems (GDSs) and 20% legacy systems.
“I think it’s going to continue to go at that pace. We’re trying to sunset EDIFACT—I think all the major airlines are at some point in time. That’s going to mean natural organic growth to NDC and to direct channels.”
Goodbye NDC, hello MCP?
In the autumn of 2012, IATA unveiled its plans for NDC to help airlines reshape how their content would be presented to consumers and travel sellers.
Airlines progressed at different speeds with the technology, commercial impact was debated and the industry evolved to focus on an offer and order retailing ecosystem. Then came AI, and some industry executives believe it could eliminate the need for standards as well as some of the complexity across the landscape.
“I’m hearing a lot about the complexity in NDC adoption. How much does it really matter in this AI world? I’ve seen integrations that took maybe two or three months being done in a day. Maybe on search and distribution I think many of the standards are not even that important any more,” said Guido Becher, global head of travel and loyalty for Rappi.
“If you don’t have a human trying to understand that standard but just have a trained agent or model that can understand that complexity. Maybe it’s not so important to spend so many millions on fixing that.”
Riccardo Vittoria, co-founder and CEO of Acai, added, “In servicing, AI can be a disruptor, in bookings we need to see. I say that because agentic AI has a lot of cognitive power, it can do so much, it can do things better than humans lightning fast, but it’s still expensive.”
Johnny Thorsen, VP strategic business development for Serko, called AI a “transformative technology.”
“People are very quickly going to realize that you have to accept you have made in current products is going to be a waste of money to continue. At Serko, we decided last year we were not going to try to move AI into the existing OBTs tools we have, it’s never going to deliver full value. We decided that the old products had reached the end of their development lifecycle. NDC will go through the same, there’s no doubt. MCP, WebMCP, these products are only one year old and already have the potential to replace NDC.”
The look-to-book problem
NDC has already increased the look-to-book ratio for airlines and their technology providers from a few hundred into the thousands, according to a recent white paper from the IATA. And the CEOs of GDSs Amadeus and Sabre have said that has only been exacerbated by AI.
“Part of the reasons look-to-book has become a problem because of the way we’ve set up our commercial constructs for years does not even really address it. In the world where you have a partner who has a reason to drive really high look-to-book, maybe they would be willing to to pay for that cost in the process, and we haven’t really given people a chance to do so … Really we need to get to a point just like anything else where it is a commodity and you can choose whether you have a little of it or a lot of it,” said Geurin.
United’s Toth said it already has a look-to-book ratio problem and is not even in the AI space. He said it is being driven by a lot of testing going on with NDC without bookings but the solution is the “commercial construct.”
Less limitations, more benefits
The travel industry has a history of bringing in new technology while maintaining constraints and complexity, often because of concerns about irrevocably breaking underlying infrastructure. As the industry moves towards orders, can it cast off old technologies, including passenger name records, and the related ways of working?
Chris Phillips, chief commercial officer of ATPCO, said his primary concern about orders is the ambition and the potential for that to “crush the ability to deliver it.”
“Opportunities to find simple use cases and build some momentum and demonstrate the value that is there is how it needs to get started, but testing that out is going to be the hard part,” he said.
According to Alice Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Kyte, the industry is likely to exist in a hybrid state over the next decade.
“We’re not going to overcome these hurdles by just transitioning in a short period of time. One of the biggest hurdles is that airlines still fail to see the real benefit for making this transition; the real business case isn’t there yet—unless something really radical happens like the internet as we know it today is no longer applicable and we move into a new dimension. Maybe that’s where we start to think order management has to comply with this new way of connecting digitally. As I see it today, it’s going to be really difficult to compete with how we do things because of the airports, because of disruption.”
Tags: Neil Geurin, American Airlines Johnny Thorsen, Serko Chris Phillips, ATPCO Distribution
