American Airlines / NDC - Your thoughts? Your TMC's thoughts?

[susankovac]

Hello!

I have mixed feelings on AA/NDC. I would like to hear your opinion on American Airlines move to NDC as well as what is the opinion of your TMC?

Thank you,

[SEUlf]

... it seems nobody knows any specifics... except that 40% of the AA content disappeared from the GDS, BUT

what kind of content?

perhaps the most restricted fares?

are route deals still available?

is it a turn from business travel related content to a more leisure driven content?

what I would do is to analyse the current volume with AA stripped down on top routes and evaluate if some routes can be served by other airlines

I know Dallas is a huge hub, however, my guess is that all the others can at least take a piece of the current volume... 

sorry, there is unfortunately not more (at least nothing substantial)

[KevinD]

@susankovac definitely a hot topic. I suggest posting this question in the Admin Group. You might get more responses there. 🙂

[sasrsc]

Yeah, this invokes lots of emotions depending on where you sit. First of all. Can you blame AA? They want to save money and that must surely be the driver. Whatever other reasons they provide are valid but it's the $$ that drive this first IMHO. If it's not AA then it will be someone else. In fact I just got an email from SABRE asking if I wanted to turn on UA NDC.... 

From a TMC perspective - we are a CTD - This is a big deal if it pans out the way AA is talking. We rely on SABRE as the source of truth and we are not currently paying for the tools to service NDC and/or Travel Fusion content (TPConnects, Accelya, TF Desktop / Web portal). The last thing we want to do is pick up the phone to be told the wait time is 5 hours with AA. We did turn on the SABRE NDC connection but of course, Concur is not consuming that, so Concur right now remains oblivious to the NDC fares as we don't want to turn on the TF connection for NDC yet. Our agents can then play with it to see what / if any should be done that way. We were hoping Concur would connect via the SABRE API and hence keep SABRE as the source of truth. But alas... no... or at least not yet. In the meantime we are evaluating SABRE's v1 rollout of the AA NDC booking functionality. But I'm living in the past. 

From a Consumer/Customer perspective - I don't care as long as I can get what I want. I shouldn't have to worry about the processes behind the scenes. 

I fully expect NDC to be the new normal 5-10 years from now, so we need to embrace. The GDS should no longer be the final source of truth. There are other tools out there that may be worth a look as a "fresh view" on travel purchasing. We can't bury our heads and expect NDC to go away. In fact I can see the potential for a positive impact but it's just breaking all the established practices like a bull in a china shop. So there will be some fallout and injuries on the way. 

I give a Concur a C- rating for how they have handled this given what information I have at my fingertips. We'll never know the truth will we! AA, SABRE and Concur will say whatever makes them look in the best light... we're just the pawns in this. I give AA a C- for their handling of this and SABRE a B-. 

At this point there's no impact on us, but I heard that AA's threat to pull 40% of the fares is going to happen gradually, so while it's no impact on us today, it could be an impact in a week or a month. 

[susankovac]

Thank you for your thoughts. 🙂

[jmerwin]

Hi all- suggested help from our product folks, and the link has more info 🙂

American Airlines began offering their best available third-party public channel content only through NDC connections, effective April 3rd. SAP Concur has you covered with two options to continue uninterrupted access to AA’s best content. Concur TripLink captures bookings made on suppliers’ websites or mobile apps and brings them back into your SAP Concur solutions. You can also access AA’s NDC content in Concur Travel via Concur Select Access, powered by Travelfusion. Learn more here.