Offers and Orders: where are we?

For many airlines, Offers and Orders has been a key topic in 2023, and will continue to be in 2024. As a matter of fact, we predict that even more airlines will seriously look at what Offers and Orders really brings, and if deemed valuable will start analysis on how they can transition.

A brief look to the end of 2022 saw IATA and several airlines initiate the Airline Retailing Consortium. The consortium worked through 2023 to define an industry business case which can be applied by airlines at a high level and gives considerable pointers on where cost and benefit will come from. A business reference architecture was developed as well as an airline transition plan (with TiM’s support). Finally, an Industry Transition Paper was published in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. For 2024, the consortium aims to deliver some procurement guidelines. For those who have not had the time to review these documents, we urge you to visit the link above and skim through these documents.

We have heard from several airlines quite publicly about their ambitions and aims for the Offers and Orders Transformation (OOT). Lufthansa announced their path to be off PSS by around 2028. Air France KLM announced in October 2023 that their executives approved the funding and the business case to initiate their transformation. Saudia announced their move to Amadeus’ Nevio product by 2025. And those are just a handful of the public announcements. At Travel in Motion, we are working with several other airlines on concepts and transformation design towards Offers and Orders.

What will 2024 bring?

At an industry level, we think it is safe to say that IATA and the Airline Retailing Consortium will continue its efforts to drive forward the transition and provide additional support and materials to airlines. We also believe that at an industry level, we are beyond the concept phase, and have now moved to the design phase. We recently outlined this in a whitepaper we published. To support the industry efforts, we ask IATA and the consortium to focus on some of the more challenging parts such as:

• Interline and intermodal travel – less from a technical perspective, but rather from a business process and settlement perspective.
• Legacy conversion and backwards compatibility – supporting the industry with conversion processes and tools to support the airlines with the ambition to move forward but who are held back by having to interact with airlines which (currently) have no ambition to change.
• DCS and the related departure control processes and the ground handlers, by bringing them on board, getting their buy-in and perhaps most importantly, demonstrating to the ground handlers the benefits of change.

And while there are many more areas, these are perhaps the areas in which we have encountered the highest levels of uncertainty among airlines.

At an airline level, we expect that more large and mid-size airlines will be educating themselves on the value of offers and orders. At the same time, they will be talking to their incumbent vendors to understand their transition plans. Many will also be talking to those vendors which seem to have made the most progress in the past years towards the world of Offers and Orders. We project that dozens of airlines will start building their business cases and designing their possible transition path. We already see that this is front of mind with many airlines from the number of educational, analysis and design workshops we have been engaged to deliver in late 2023 and early 2024. Often, and this is the best-case scenario, this is tied tightly to an overarching distribution strategy review, as the alignment of the future of airline distribution and the world of Offers and Orders is extremely important to get the greatest benefits in the short and mid-term.

We urge airlines who have not yet started any activity in this area to review the IATA consortium documentation and to closely monitor what your competitors and more importantly, your close airline partners are doing.

We recommend to those airlines who have already done some research and analysis, but not yet initiated any true change to start the planning of the transition design, and identifying the areas of quick wins versus the complex areas which will take considerable time, and to not stand still.

We ask of those airlines well advanced with their journey to share their learnings with the industry to make the overall transformation less of a challenge for everyone. The greatest benefit to the industry and the consumer comes then when we have done a large-scale transformation and airlines can, at a larger scale, take advantage of the technologies and richer digital interactions with customers.

Finally, we ask the vendors involved to make clear their proposition, and to proactively work with airlines, IATA and other industry partners to drive forward on their paths, and to identify, address and eliminate technology challenges as quickly as possible. We urge new vendors to come into this space and provide modules and components, ideas and innovation – and we sincerely hope the airlines reward you for that by giving those new vendors their trust.

For Travel in Motion, we see a very busy year ahead. We have gained a lot of knowledge from our work over the past eight years working with IATA and airlines on NDC, ONE Order and Dynamic Offers. We have spent the past five years working with airlines on the order transformation by doing projects such as interline proof of concepts to engaging with airlines to define a transition concept and design a complete multi-year roadmap. We are convinced that this work over the past years has given us great insight into the challenges, the benefits and the methodology, but also into the vendor landscape and the airlines’ needs for the next years. Thus, our key focus for 2024 will be supporting airlines, vendors, and IATA on the continued transition to Offers and Orders.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG