When the Modern Airline Retailing (MAR) programme kicked off in earnest around 2022, it did so with a mix of scepticism, excitement and ambition. Airlines had spent a decade talking about transformation while wrestling with legacy plumbing that persists. The buzz and hype have turned into activity, and progress since then has been unmistakable. Volumes of NDC transactions grew, more carriers began experimenting with Orders and vendors retooled roadmaps. With the creation of the Airline Retailing Consortium and the countless hours airlines, vendors, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and consultancies put into it, the foundations were laid.

As 2026 comes into view, one should not expect a revolution but rather an evolution of deliberate, confident steps. The industry is moving from “proving the concept” to “making it normal”. Below are the areas where that should be most visible.

Airlines: Pragmatism with Visible Results

Airlines in 2026 are not chasing transformation for the sake of transformation. They are chasing bottom-line improvements, operational predictability and competitive differentiation.

Expect more airlines to announce concrete MAR milestones: full Order pilots in selected channels, retirement of niche legacy flows or live continuous pricing in indirect markets through NDC. Carriers with strong digital DNA and a clear executive-set focus will move faster, but even traditionally conservative players will take meaningful steps driven partly by vendor capability finally catching up, fear of missing out and seeing their partners and competitors making the move. Other factors which will drive decision timelines are expiring passenger service system (PSS) contracts, opportunities to break free from vendor lock-ins and new commercial opportunities.

We will also see airlines get bolder with product differentiation. Rich media, personalised bundles, post-purchase upsell flows and dynamically-created ancillaries will expand as the offer and order management and related systems increase in maturity and reliability. What was previously “demo-ware” will turn into everyday retailing.

Finally, airlines are realising they must treat MAR as an enterprise project with corporate-driven roadmaps, not merely a distribution or technology initiative. We can expect organisational rewiring: commercial, digital, operations and finance working against a coordinated roadmap.

Industry: From Advocacy to Alignment

The broader ecosystem enters 2026 with more clarity on its role.

TiM believes that IATA’s job should increasingly shift from evangelising to enabling. Standards stabilisation (and please, acceleration), governance frameworks, removing regulatory hurdles and settlement evolution should be core focus areas. We expect progress on interline Order capabilities and clarity on product definition and data alignment.

We expect the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) and the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) to keep nudging the industry towards practical adoption. ARC will optimally expand Order-based settlement pilots, while ATPCO refines the bridge between fare filing and dynamic offer construction, providing structure without stifling innovation.

Meanwhile, airports, travel management companies (TMCs) and global distribution systems (GDSs) must be involved more by the airlines, IATA and the consortium to deepen their integration efforts. Without the buy-in of these key ecosystem players, even the best intended transformation plans will not be executed. Airports must focus on making Order data usable for operational planning with the support of the airport software vendors which usually provide a legacy departure control system (DCS). Furthermore, together with airlines, regulators and tech companies, the use of data and biometrics should be expanded to move towards streamlined airport operations which allow customers to have more dwell time for shopping, dining, working or socialising. The innovative TMCs we should see building richer servicing and duty-of-care flows on top of Orders rather than fighting them. GDSs, already repositioning as multi-source aggregators, will continue modernising back-office processes to handle Orders natively.

Technology: The Quiet Enabler

Technology’s role in MAR in 2026 will not invent new buzzwords but rather focus on three practical themes: simplification, decoupling and automation.

The decoupling of Offers and Orders will continue to mature. In 2026, expect more airlines and vendors to treat the order management system (OMS) as the new “gravitational centre” of retailing. While not fully independent from the PSS, we should see capability of orchestrating fulfilment, servicing and settlement events across partners. The shift will not be large-scale globally just yet, but pilots will start turning into production-grade rollouts.

Even more exciting is when application programming interface (API) performance and reliability finally become boring. This is good. Airlines that struggled to stabilise NDC APIs in earlier years are now working with vendors to mature and further standardise additional APIs. Vendors are starting to expose more granular services and deploying event-driven architectures which enable better accessibility as well as more automation built by airlines.

We can already see that artificial intelligence (AI) will stop being a sideshow. TiM expects genuine use cases to help airlines tackle tedious daily tasks, helpers to drive additional revenue or intelligence to orchestrate smart customer experience flows. Other examples we may see, aside from flashy prototypes, are automated quality checks on offer construction, anomaly detection in servicing flows or proactive failure alerts for interline Orders. AI will become a mainstay and serve as a tool in the toolbox of offer creation, order management and customer experience.

We believe technology in 2026 is not about breakthroughs; it is about making the plumbing trustworthy enough that commercial teams can implement new features and capabilities with confidence.

Vendors: Convergence and Clarity

The vendor landscape has spent the last few years in a curious state of both innovation and identity crisis. In 2026, this stabilises and vendors will have defined more clearly in which space they play across the digital retailing ecosystem.

We expect clearer segmentation. The large PSS providers will double down on refining their hybrid models, supporting legacy EDIFACT and legacy system compatibility while offering progressively stronger and, we hope, modular solutions. Mid-tier tech firms that have been in the airline space for a while, and those that more recently entered with enthusiasm will either consolidate or specialise: offer optimisation, segmentation, merchandising via product catalogue and stock keeper, order orchestration microservices, integrations for interline and codeshare and so on. From TiM’s perspective, we hope to see a few examples of true modularity, and one or two bold purchasing decisions where some of the underdogs get a true chance to shine.

Crucially, vendors will be far more transparent about timelines and capabilities, and they will have to be – now it is about commitment and not selling a dream. After years of marketing roadmaps that overshot reality, 2026 brings a more grounded tone. Airlines will push for and get firmer delivery commitments, better transition planning and more standardised interfaces that reduce custom build cycles.

Another shift, and perhaps an overshoot of optimism on our part: integration costs go down, not because the work is easier, but because more vendors align on IATA schemas, adopt shared tooling, utilise AI helpers and participate in joint reference implementations. Interoperability becomes less aspirational and more contractual.

In 2026, Modern Airline Retailing will not “arrive”, but it will become more of a reality for many airlines. Incremental value will be generated by early adopters of initial modules; the legacy systems will have to loosen their grip. The ecosystem, while still in a hybrid mode this year and for several years to come, starts benefiting from the removal of legacy concepts and the use of modern architecture and technology. Progress will be uneven but unmistakably forward.

If the past four years were about proving the value of MAR, 2026 is the year the industry starts extracting that value. Perhaps not yet at scale, but steady drops also fill a bucket.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG

This post had been published in cooperation with Terrapinn and the World Aviation Festival.

The airline industry is undergoing one of its most significant transformations in decades: the shift from legacy, ticket/EMD-based processes to Offer and Order–based retailing. This evolution does not only redefine how airlines sell and service products, but also how they account for, settle, and recognise revenue. Financial settlement which has for a long time being anchored in structured, sometimes even paper-ticket-driven workflows must now adapt to a world where products are very dynamically created, aggregated, and fulfilled and some standard processes shall vanish. Order Accounting emerges as the essential backbone enabling this transition, promising more flexible, accurate, and real-time financial visibility. Yet the journey will differ considerably across full-service carriers (FSC), airlines in a hybrid operational model, and low-cost carriers (LCC). In this blog I will explore where the industry currently stands, how solution providers are preparing, and what the shift means for each airline type.

Where Is the Industry? Where Are the Providers?

Order Accounting has moved from conceptual discussions to early-stage implementation. Several pioneering airlines, mostly major network carriers have begun foundational work to align their financial systems with the transition to Offers and Orders. However, the industry as a whole is still very much in a hybrid world: tickets and orders (when applicable) coexist, legacy settlement rules and cycles remain deeply embedded, and standards for Order Accounting are still evolving.

Industry status today:

• Standards bodies like IATA have advanced definitions for Orders but are still maturing the accompanying financial processes.
• Airlines are experimenting through pilots, proofs of concept, and phased transformations, primarily focusing on front-end retailing capabilities.
• Technology readiness is uneven—Order Management Systems (OMS) are progressing rapidly, but Order Accounting systems lag behind, often still tied to ticket-based data architecture they are somehow obliged to cope with.
• Interline, IROPs and alliance complexities remain largely unsolved in the context of orders, requiring major rethinking of settlement and clearing processes.

Where providers stand:
The provider landscape is fragmented and still emerging.

• Large PSS and revenue accounting vendors are planning or extending existing systems with “Order Accounting modules,” though the depth of true order-centric design varies significantly.
• New-generation OMS providers are beginning to integrate financial capabilities, but often lack the maturity of established accounting engines.
• Specialised startups are entering the space with cloud-native, modular accounting solutions—innovative, but not yet proven at scale.
• Industry intermediaries (e.g., ATPCO, ARC, clearing houses) are exploring how they might support financial processes in an order-driven world from different anckles.

In short, while the retailing landscape accelerates, the accounting and settlement layer is still forming. This lag poses risks but also creates a unique opportunity for carriers and providers to influence how Order Accounting will work.

Impact of Order Accounting Across Different Airline Types

Full-Service Carriers

Network carriers stand to gain the most from Order Accounting but also face the highest complexity. Their operations rely heavily on interline partnerships, codeshares, prorates, and intricate revenue streams. Under today’s ticket-based system, financial reporting is often delayed, fragmented, and filled with exceptions.

Impact on FSCs:

• Significant back-office simplification as ticket/EMD-based events, coupons, and documents are replaced with a single Order as the source of truth.
• Greater real-time revenue visibility, enabling more accurate profitability analysis across itineraries and channels.
• Improved servicing capabilities, especially for complex journeys involving multiple partners.
• Challenges around interoperability, particularly ensuring cross-industry settlement can function without tickets.
• Major transformation effort, requiring coordination between revenue accounting, finance, distribution, and IT.

For FSCs, Order Accounting is not optional, it is foundational to achieving the full benefits of modern retailing and operational efficiency. But they must plan for a multi-year journey.

Hybrid Airlines

Hybrid carriers operate with a mix of simplicity and complexity, offering ancillary-rich products but occasionally implementing partnerships or network-like structures. They are often more agile and less constrained by decades-old accounting infrastructure.

Impact on hybrid airlines:

• Meaningful efficiency gains from consolidating accounting events into a unified order structure.
• Greater flexibility in pricing and bundling strategies as accounting becomes less tied to rigid ticketing data.
• Reduced settlement overhead, especially for carriers with limited interline exposure.
• Moderate transformation cost, usually lower than for FSCs but higher than for pure LCCs.
• Opportunities for competitive differentiation, as real-time financial data can support more dynamic commercial decision-making.

For hybrids, Order Accounting is both achievable and strategically beneficial. They can move faster and gain advantage by adopting modern retailing earlier than competitors.

Low-Cost Carriers

LCCs often operate with simple, direct-sales-driven models and minimal interline activity. Many already use accounting systems that are relatively modern compared with legacy FSC systems, and they benefit from strong alignment between inventory, sales, and settlement.

Impact on LCCs:

• Lower urgency for immediate transformation existing LCC processes already resemble simplified order structures.
• Simplification benefits still exist, especially around ancillaries, servicing, and financial reconciliation.
• Incremental gains in financial transparency and automation.
• Potential future requirement, as industry ecosystems (including partners, payment providers, and regulators) move toward orders.
• Opportunity for low-friction adoption, thanks to simpler operational and business models.

LCCs will feel the pressure later than FSCs or hybrids, but early awareness and gradual preparation will avoid future disruption.

Wrap-Up

Order Accounting represents the financial foundation of the future retailing landscape. The transformation will be significant but also uneven.

• FSCs must begin laying the groundwork now, as their complexity and interline reliance demand early investment.
• Hybrid carriers have an opportunity to move boldly and gain competitive advantage through modernised accounting capabilities.
• LCCs face less pressure in the short term but should recognise that Order Accounting will become industry-standard and start preparing accordingly.

The provider ecosystem is evolving, but not yet mature. This gives airlines a rare chance to help shape the solutions that will serve them in the coming decade. Ultimately, Order Accounting is not merely a technical upgrade, it is the key to unlocking true airline retailing, efficient settlement, and real-time financial clarity. Those who prepare early will be best positioned to succeed in the new landscape.

Joachim Zintl, Travel in Motion AG

The airline industry is undergoing one of its most significant transformations in decades. The shift toward Modern Airline Retailing (MAR) is no longer a distant vision—it’s happening now. For years, the transition to Offers and Orders has been discussed, but the pace has accelerated. Airlines have started the transition from legacy Passenger Service Systems (PSS) to modern Offer-Order Management Systems (OOMS) to enable dynamic, personalized retailing.

The transition has profound implications for Revenue Management (RM). Retailing enables dynamic, context-specific offers and a more granular trip-specific customer segmentation. To support this, RM must evolve from managing static fare classes to dynamic offer optimisation, including real-time offer curation and contextualised pricing.

Traditional RM: from enabler to obstacle

For decades, Revenue Management (RM) has been the backbone of airline profitability— managing inventories to balance supply and demand while leveraging customers’ willingness-to-pay. This was achieved through forecasting class-based demand and optimising booking class availability. Historically, these mechanisms worked well to segment demand and differentiate products and prices, but today they limit airlines from creating customer-centric, journey-specific offers. Other industries have long surpassed airlines in modern e-commerce capabilities.

Retailing-friendly RM – what will it take?

1. Separate Product from Price

As booking classes and filed fares will become obsolete, airlines gain the freedom to dynamically bundle flights and ancillary services in context-specific offers, and to price them without being constrained to specific price points. Modern product management must evolve to manage components and bundling logic, rather than relying on pre-defined static bundles.
Without classes and filed fares, prices must be optimized for dynamic bundles and a-la-carte ancillaries. Forecasting and optimization models need to handle contextualization and dynamic bundle construction. Real-time pricing modules are essential—offline pre-calculation will no longer suffice in such a dynamic world.

2. Balance “the new” supply and demand for price optimisation 

Despite changes to product and price, RM still needs to balance supply and demand and optimize the passenger mix. The optimised price must reflect capacity constraints, whether for seats or limited supplies of certain ancillary services.

Solutions will still need to determine the opportunity cost of the next unit, or, as revenue managers call it, the bid price. The logic extends from seats to capacity-constrained ancillaries. In the future, opportunity cost needs to additionally reflect post-booking ancillary sales of potential future customers and marginal cost of items offered.

Price optimisation will split into two components:

• a capacity-centric view to determine opportunity cost for seats and capacity-constrained ancillary services, and
• a customer-centric view to build and price contextualized dynamic offers.

While the former averages across all demand segments for a resource and can run offline, the latter requires evaluating customer, request, and market context in real-time. As offer creation moves from distribution partners to the airlines, processing requests in real time with high shopping volumes, e.g., from meta-searchers, becomes a challenge that must be addressed for any new-generation price optimization to scale.

3. Up-level demand forecasting models 

Forecasting demand at increasingly granular levels has always been challenging, also for analysts to comprehending, validating, and influencing system forecasts. As demand segmentation becomes more detailed and context-driven in the new world, this will become even more pronounced. Splitting price optimization into a capacity and customer perspective might allow forecasters and analysts to work on natural aggregates, i.e., leg-level and market-level demand.

Estimating market demand needs to evolve from discrete demand across classes to segment-specific class-less willingness-to-pay (WTP) distributions. This eliminates the restriction of 26 letters of the alphabet and allows unlimited price points.

4. Adopt a new view of willingness-to-pay and elasticity

While airlines have extensive experience in pricing airfare bundles, dynamic pricing for ancillaries is particularly challenging due to limited historical variability. Techniques such as reinforcement learning can help generate the necessary data while simultaneously exploiting customers’ willingness-to-pay. The potential revenue and profit uplifts justify the effort. Several airlines have reported double-digit uplifts when dynamically pricing ancillaries.

Pricing dynamic bundles is still being researched in the scientific and industry communities. Historically, estimating cross-price elasticities from booking data was virtually unfeasible. Dynamically adding components to bundles and optimising contextualised prices requires addressing cross-elasticities. Additionally, bundle and ancillary prices need to be consistent to avoid confusing customers. For example, a superior bundle including an additional ancillary must not be more expensive than an inferior bundle with the ancillary offered a-la-carte. Improved solutions will capitalize on advances in machine learning, combined with a stronger data foundation moving from traditional bookings to Orders consolidating all purchase information.

Additional data streams, such as competitive insights or shopping sessions, can now be integrated to optimise offers. New data sources will emerge in the future, and solutions must be flexible to incorporate them with limited effort. For example, ski resorts in Switzerland and Austria already today factor in weather forecasts to dynamically price ski passes.

5. Prepare for organisational changes

The change beyond technology is not to be underestimated. Revenue managers have long thought in terms of controlling the availability of static fares supplied by pricing managers. Pricing has been structured around fares and fare ladders for decades. Ancillary services are usually handled separately from flights. Moving to Modern Airline Retailing will require rethinking organizations and redesigning established processes to break down siloed decision-making into a holistic market/customer perspective and a capacity/flight perspective. This split also helps re-define clear-cut responsibilities in the organisation.

The way forward

While the potential is enormous—with the promise to drive profits and customer loyalty—the transformation process is, without a doubt, complex and challenging. Luckily, vendors and front-running airlines have already developed promising solutions. Airline leaders must start the transition and follow a stepwise approach as systems become available and more sophisticated.

Progress is already happening, at an accelerated pace year over year. For example, continuous pricing is already practiced by many airlines; solutions are available from various vendors. Even with legacy PSS and RM systems, simple interpolation between filed fares is a starting point. Once solutions are capable of determining an optimal price point, discounting filed fares based on context is the next step.

Sequentially, class-less forecasting and optimisation models will replace legacy RM and pave the road to offers in the absence of filed fares. In parallel, modules for ancillary services can be deployed to gain experience and benefit from uplift potential.

Airlines starting the transition on the IT side need to address organizational changes in parallel and can gain valuable experience with newly designed processes.

During the transition, one more challenge will persist for quite some time: airline and distribution partners might not move as fast and still require legacy processes requiring translation layers connecting the old and new world.

In summary, the future of Revenue Management will be a fascinating, complex, and (sometimes) messy process as our industry continues its journey toward MAR.

Matthias Viehmann, Travel in Motion AG

This post had been published in cooperation with Terrapinn and the World Aviation Festival.

The transition to Modern Airline Retailing (MAR) has taken off. Numerous airlines are engaged in or considering procurement projects, and a few have already made their first vendor selections.

MAR is also a key subject of the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) currently ongoing World Passenger and World Finance Symposium in Istanbul, with many vendors and airlines announcing progress in their transition. This is a good moment not only to reflect on the current status of the MAR transition but also to look ahead to what can be expected in the future.

We have summarised our thoughts in our latest white paper:

“Modern Airline Retailing 2025: Realities, Lessons and the Next Horizon”

which we are publishing today. We invite you to download and read it.

We would like to thank Flyr for sponsoring this white paper. This sponsorship enables us to make it available to the whole industry.

Matthias Viehmann, Professor of Aviation Management and Quantitative Methods at University of Applied Sciences Worms, supports Travel in Motion (TiM) in revenue management and dynamic pricing. With airlines transitioning to Modern Airline Retailing (MAR), the offer process is becoming key to enhancing the customer experience and increasing airline revenue.
Matthias, who holds a PhD in economics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), combines airline experience gained during his career at Lufthansa and consulting various airlines with the latest academic research in this highly complex and scientific field. Hochschule Worms is one of the leading European research and educational institutions for aviation management.
Jointly with TiM’s Senior Advisor, Peter Schöber, and other leading TiM experts, Matthias will strengthen TiM’s capabilities in revenue management and dynamic offer consulting. Matthias’s academic foundation elevates the partnership with TiM beyond joint projects to also include practice-driven research.
Do you want to get to know Matthias? He will host one of our next TiMcast, focusing on the latest trends in revenue management – stay tuned!

Wow – what a journey it has been. Time flies when you are having fun, and fun it has been. On 6 October 2015, Nick Stott and Daniel Friedli officially incorporated Travel in Motion GmbH – at that time as a limited liability company (LLC) with very limited future growth plans or vision, simply aiming to provide their knowledge and experience to the industry without the influence of an employer acting in its own interest rather than that of the customer. Since then, we have grown into a team of 17 highly motivated and experienced aviation experts with a strong focus on the digital transformation of airlines’ commercial processes and systems.

From a two-man show with the occasional freelancer to support us when workloads increased, we gradually expanded. We had a decision to make, and we made it. We decided to grow and add value to our industry not only by helping airlines and vendors tackle their commercial strategic growth but also by being a bridge between the numerous players in the ecosystem. The evolution of our industry is only possible if all market participants aim for the same target and overcome incumbent conflicting interests – and we want to play a fundamental role in enabling this.

We hired our first employees and expanded our ownership structure to include Boris Padovan and Andrea Riesen, both of whom helped set the foundation for our growth plan. With them, we began executing our expansion. Our first few employees were instrumental in convincing us that growth is the right trajectory. However, this was just the beginning. Soon we realised that our small team was no longer able to manage the demand and that we’d need additional people. However, hiring is not easy and finding the right match in terms of knowledge and skill as well as the ability to engage with customers in a constructive and empathetic manner proved more challenging than expected. We started to look beyond the borders of Switzerland and decided that a multinational team spread throughout Europe would work as well. It was more important to grow sustainably than quickly.

Prior to the organic growth, we used 2022 to enter into a very fruitful strategic partnership with Oystin Advisory, a German consulting firm focused on the distribution aspect of airlines. Our partnership with Oystin has also been pivotal to our expansion, as together we serve our airline customers in all areas of distribution – from commercial strategies to transformation strategies, and from distribution contracting to technology procurement and contracting. With this additional momentum from that collaboration, we were headed for additional growth. To cater for that growth, we transition from a limited liability company (LLC) to a true shareholding in July 2024.

Soon, we had team members in the UK, Finland, Croatia, France, Germany, Estonia and Portugal – a new challenge in terms of communication and coordination but one we gladly take upon us. We not only had various nationalities represented, but also varying degrees of experience and different fields. We also had a number of specialists as freelancers – people who excel in a specific area and can support TiM with long-term industry experience and key pockets of knowledge which will help us cover an even wider scope in the airline commercial scope.

A big step for Travel in Motion in 2025 was incorporating Joachim Zintl’s Tailwind Consulting into TiM. That allowed our group of partners to grow from three to four, with Joachim Zintl  joining us to further expand Travel in Motion in the area of payment, settlement and airline finance.

At the same time, TiM had to become more professional while maintaining its spirit and start-up-like enthusiasm. We had to build an internal organisation with defined responsibilities and processes – not always easy, as we wanted to maintain the momentum that comes from a motivated team. We didn’t want to build hierarchies but needed to implement more structure. With that, in April 2025 we transition to a structure with better defined leadership roles, clear responsibilities over company strategy, marketing, business development, human resources and finance. Optimising business operations had become much more important.

Looking back, we are proud to have overcome the biggest hurdles including COVID, early teething challenges and establishing an internal structure, without compromising our spirit, openness and love for the work we do. We have been able to maintain a culture of professionalism while being fair and doing all we can first and foremost in our customer’s interest, not in ours or not in the interest of an external entity. At the same time, we have been able to build a team of like-minded and motivated people to carry our message and methodology into the world. And, we have built a team with many younger people with new ideas, new ways of working and an excitement for this industry, which is unparalleled,

Looking forward, we are confident that we can maintain this momentum, and we will continue to work every day in every engagement to remain your partner of choice and trust. Thank you for carrying us to where we are today! We are incredibly proud of our team, we have kept its spirit, and we continue to thrive in serving our industry: airlines, vendors and industry bodies.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG

P.S. Interested in more official and less official background on ten years of TiM? Listen to our October TiMcast, where Daniel Friedli, Nick Stott, Boris Padovan and Joachim Zintl share one story or another, moderated by Susan Carter.

Are you attending IATA’s World Passenger Symposium or World Financial Symposium in Istanbul on 5 and 6 November? If you are, we would like to draw your attention to our second Airline IT Vendor Distribution and Retailing Masterclass, as several airline IT vendor partners have approached us asking for a dedicated masterclass for the vendor community.

We are therefore pleased to announce that we will hold our next

Airline IT Vendor Distribution and Retailing Masterclass – exclusively for the vendor community – in

Istanbul on 4 November 2025

(the day before IATA’s World Passenger and World Financial Symposiums)
from 12:00 to 18:00. It will be followed by a joint drinks reception with finger food.

Our agenda includes sharing insights from our airline engagements, providing thought leadership and offering a forum for the vendor community to exchange ideas and discuss without airline participation:

12:00 Kick-off with a joint lunch
13:00 Status of the industry
13:45 Perceived challenges of the transition to modern airline retailing
    Views from an industry and airline perspective
14:45 What airlines are considering in their procurement processes
15:45 Break
16:15 Learnings from TiM engagements
17:00 TiM’s recommendations to the vendor community
17:30 Discussion and wrap-up
18:00 Drinks reception with finger food
20:00 Finish

The fee is CHF 1,750 per person, with a reduction of 15% for the second ticket and 25% for the third and any further tickets purchased by employees of the same company.

You may register here for this event.

We look forward to discussing and seeing you in Istanbul.

Rethinking Airline Loyalty Part II: Making Traveller Status Real

In my previous blog Rethinking Airline Loyalty: Why Traveller Status Could Be a Strategic Game-Changer, I posed a provocation: what if airlines could reward travellers before they ever flew with them, simply based on travel behaviour elsewhere? A “Traveller Status”. Since publishing that post, I have received strong feedback and comments. The enthusiasm for the idea was matched only by the question that inevitably followed: “How would we actually do this?”

Let us move from concept to action. Turning this idea into reality is more than perks and marketing. It touches data access, IT infrastructure, partnerships and even the politics of loyalty programmes. Here is how airlines can make Traveller Status real and the roadblocks they will need to navigate.

How to collect travel behaviour outside your ecosystem

The Traveller Status model rests on one foundational capability: access to travellers’ flight behaviour before they ever book with your airline. That requires both data sources and traveller incentives:

• Traveller-provisioned data: encourage travellers to share their past travel activity through opt-in mechanisms such as
  • Email parsing: tools that extract flight details from confirmation emails (e.g., how TripIt and Google Trips work)
  • Loyalty wallet apps: leverage platforms that aggregate loyalty accounts (e.g., AwardWallet, Point.me or Cardlytics)
  • Receipt syncing apps: allow users to upload travel receipts or sync with apps such as Expensify
• Corporate and TMC feeds: partner with TMCs and corporate travel platforms to analyse aggregated, anonymised behaviour of frequent business travellers
• Travel affinity signals: explore partnerships with data marketplaces or customer data platforms (CDPs) that use web cookies, bookings and cross-site behaviour to identify travel-intent users across brands
• Incentivising travellers to share data: travellers will provide their data if the value is clear. Practical motivators include
  • Status jumpstart: “Get Traveller Status by syncing your travel activity, no miles needed”
  • Gamification: “Unlock vouchers or perks based on verified travel behaviour”; “Gain wallet cash for each trip”; “Collect stamps in your digital travel book for discounts”
  • Loyalty match and upgrade: match their status elsewhere and instantly upgrade if they share proof of travel volume.

This turns data collection into a transparent, high-value exchange.

Who gets Traveller Status?

Once data is collected, airlines can define the segmentation logic for Traveller Status (e.g. 10 or more flights in the past six months, overlap with strategic routes, premium cabin or ancillary spend), using behaviour indicators that show acquisition potential.

How to reward the traveller

Most loyalty programmes today reward how much someone flies. But in the retail era of airline commerce, how they book and interact can be just as valuable, especially for Traveller Status. This opens the door to a more modern framework, where profitable, direct or high-engagement behaviours are rewarded.

Channel-based incentives: prioritise and reward behaviours that drive better margin or data ownership for your airline:

• Booking directly on airline.com or the mobile app: cash wallet credit, fee waivers, discounts or early access to sales or dynamic offers
• Engagement with owned channels: rewards for using the app (push notifications, wallet cards, in-app upgrades); perks for opting in to personalisation, alerts and fare tracking
• NDC-based purchases: incentivise bookings through partners connected via NDC, similar to booking directly

Profile enrichment: offer perks or Traveller Status credits for completing profile information, preferences or payment details. This strategy turns Traveller Status into a retail onboarding engine.

What are the IT and commercial implications?

This shift from reactive loyalty to proactive engagement will require investment, but it positions airlines for long-term commercial agility.

Deploying Traveller Status touches multiple systems, for which airlines must consider:

• CRM readiness to ingest and segment prospects based on external travel data
• Offer engine flexibility to personalise offers based on inferred value, not just loyalty tiers
• API infrastructure to allow integration with third-party data sources
• Consent management to comply with privacy regulations
• Customer identity resolution to link fragmented digital profiles, especially if a traveller has not previously interacted with the airline (e.g. LiveRamp, Acxiom)

It also touches the broader loyalty and commercial ecosystem, for which airlines must prepare:

• Alliance recognition: begin with benefits limited to your airline only, and extend as partners are ready
• Credit card partner reaction:
  • Use Traveller Status to highlight credit card offers tied to travel behaviour
  • Involve banks in status qualification
  • Enable credit card spending or travel-related purchases to contribute towards status
• Retail and travel partner participation:
  • Enable status based on partners’ tiers (e.g. hotel platinum or car rental gold)
  • Enable third-party partners to issue benefits for Traveller Status holders
  • Enable a shared “travel behaviour score” across your partner ecosystem
• Track performance and measure ROI:
  • Tie Traveller Status offers to unique promo codes or booking paths
  • Track redemption, upsell behaviour and lifetime value
  • Compare travellers who received offers against those who did not, but matched on behaviour

Can airlines start Traveller Status today?

The short answer: yes, but not at full scale. Current ecosystems are not built to support a fully open Traveller Status model. But airlines do not need to wait until 2030 for new architectures.

Low-risk, high-signal examples that could be deployed now include:

• Building a Traveller Status onboarding widget inside the airline app where customers can sync email receipts, add trip data manually or connect to a wallet aggregator
• Identifying fragmented travellers on high-yield routes and extending Traveller Status invitations
• Partnering with TMCs or SME travel platforms to spot multi-carrier frequent travellers, then offering Traveller Status as a conversion lever

Traveller Status reflects a fundamental shift in thinking, but it is also a test of commercial courage. For those who take the lead, the reward is significant: a smarter, faster and more direct path to building meaningful traveller relationships in a fragmented world.

Catarina Silva, Travel in Motion AG

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

One of the key benefits of Modern Airline Retailing (MAR) is the ability to sell any product, in any place, at any time—from eSIMs and in-flight digital products to luggage pickup, insurance, hotels and attractions. It sets the path toward extending retail opportunities well beyond the flight itself and invites airlines to change their perspective.

Offer and Order Management Systems are the underlying technology that enable this change. While the technology may be new, the strategic principles driving this transformation are not.

This article looks at MAR through two lenses.

First, by drawing parallels between the branded fares era and today’s developments, we can see that similar strategic shifts are at play, only this time on a far greater scale.

Second, by examining how other industries faced similar transformation pressures, we can anticipate the operational and cultural changes airlines will need to succeed.

Across both lenses, three common shifts emerge:

1. From product unbundling to customer unbundling – moving from selling more discrete items to segmenting more precise customer cohorts
2. From branded fare options to new fare offers – evolving how new products are introduced, tested and scaled with customers
3. From fare structures to an Order-based architecture – redesigning the internal systems and workflows that support a modern commercial strategy

Branded fares were the first hints of what was to come. They showed airlines could reframe their offer structure, experiment with fare benefits and re-engineer front-end selling. But successful MAR will demand even finer customer insight, a deeper commitment to iterative product introduction and a complete rework of the system of record, taking lessons from industries like banking, telecom and ecommerce.

In the sections that follow, we explore each shift in turn: comparing MAR’s challenges to its branded fares predecessors, then looking outward to other sectors to envision what modern airline retailing could truly look like.

From product unbundling to customer unbundling

Branded fares brought unbundling, or product atomisation, as a response to changing customer demands. It enabled airlines to further differentiate their flight offers from competitors by treating tangible and intangible properties as price-driving components.

Modern Airline Retailing can be considered an extension of the same principle — enabling more price points to meet customer demand. The key difference is scale. MAR introduces an overwhelming number of possible combinations, far beyond what branded fares ever faced. It is this complexity that turns segmentation from a nice-to-have into a commercial necessity. To capture the additional value, airlines must break down customer segments even more precisely and tailor their offers accordingly.

To draw an example from another industry Sarah Tavel, Pinterest’s first Product Manager, refers to these fine-tuned customer segments as “cohorts”.

She argues that building a high retention product in a global marketplace requires focusing on specific geographies, user types and behaviours. In Pinterest’s case, a cohort might be users who signed up in a given week, or weekly returners who are active but not making pins, or customers who create multiple boards each month. While users may belong to more than one cohort, each group is slightly unique. Analysing these cohorts’ impact on commercial goals, along with the behaviours that set them apart, provides the insights that ultimately drive retention.

In the airline’s case, finer segments could look like customers who always select insurance when there’s more than one person in their booking, or customers who have changed their booking multiple times, or even something as specific as solo customers on three-day short-haul trips to destinations where a different language is spoken. By investing in technology that allows for further segmentation (i.e. based on behaviours), airlines can create as many cohorts as there are product combinations in Modern Airline Retailing. This is why segmentation must be an integral part to an airline’s journey to MAR.

From branded fare options to new fare offers

With a revamped branded fares product, naturally, airlines had to update the way they sold products on their customer-facing channels. Introducing these new products meant more price points, more information to display and more decisions for the customer to make.

Some airlines split branded fare introduction into domestic and international, while others went further by region. However, all went through a learning phase, using feedback to refine commercial strategies and respond to shifting customer behaviours. Customers also had to adjust. Suddenly, they had to start paying more attention to fare conditions, scrutinise fare benefits and decide if a seat, bag, cabin or flexibility mattered enough for them to pay extra for. This was by no means an instant change; it took time for them (us, as travellers) to adapt.

Modern Airline Retailing brings this to a new level. Neither airlines nor customers have ever had this amount of products available during the travel experience. Introducing new product lines will be a test-and-learn phase for both. Customers don’t yet know what they want, and no clear best practices exist. This is a golden window for airlines to capitalise on learnings from broadening their product portfolio.

Monzo, a popular UK online bank, is a good example of a company that has built and kept a large audience through excellent customer experience. It uses this scale to test new products within a solid experimentation framework, much like airlines can with Modern Airline Retailing. In the last two years Monzo has launched three new and complex product lines with a test-and-learn approach: investments, pensions and mortgages.

In 2023, Monzo introduced its Investments product, offering a limited set of funds to an early access cohort. In their first experiment they learned that users wanted plain-English explanations, transparent fees and a frictionless first investment. Instead of rushing to expand their fund catalogue, they honed copy, onboarding and education to ensure users could find and complete the investment journey without confusion. Monzo prioritised customer understanding before making costly platform upgrades, and by mid-2025 they had 300,000 investment accounts, with one third from first-time investors.

For airlines embarking on Modern Airline Retailing, not every product initiative will suit every customer. Many will address the needs of smaller, specific cohorts, such as tickets to special events, a selection of inflight Wi-Fi speeds or ground transport connections including shuttles, buses or trains. The revenue impact will not be immediate, and customers will need time to get used to the option of buying these products within their airline travel experience.

Each product launch should be seen as a series of purposeful steps rather than an one-off event. Step by step, these products will build familiarity, deepen customer understanding, reduce friction and create new sources of value for the customer. In this model, revenue follows learning, and success comes from tracking adoption as closely as revenue to unlock long-term growth.

From fare structures to an Order-based architecture

Branded fares brought a significant front-end overhaul, but not equitably in the back-end. Airlines continue to rely on the price-setting constraints of RBDs and the servicing limitations of the PNR, eTKT and EMD structure.

To unlock the potential of Modern Airline Retailing, it is essential for airlines to change the way they internally configure, record and account their products. The centre of this next stage of transformation is the Order object. An Order-based architecture has the flexibility, bundling potential and customer-centric structure that a MAR commercial strategy requires.

Telecom is an industry that faced a similar digital transformation challenge. One specific case is that of Orange in Europe whose enterprise customer needs started to required more complex products (e.g., security policies, cloud ramp-up, access points). Although it had a very long time to market, Orange could create and sell these products, but the downstream systems couldn’t keep up. Every product change produced a multiplicative effect on fulfilment, operations, servicing and many others.

To solve this, Orange set out to change their system of record to have a single Order object with multiple Offer items within (service offers, work offers, logistics offers, etc.). With this new structure, each department could process, change and fulfil offer items independently but still have everything tied to a single source of truth. Contracting, operations, billing, servicing, accounting — the whole ecosystem – could now rely on the same information, standardised states and error codes for their operations.

Orange achieved this by setting up a new and parallel technology stack to prove the end-to-end execution of new Order object and the governance across the platform. They configured and fulfilled a narrow number of use cases in the new system, while having the legacy system handled the rest. However, in the background they ran synchronisation processes between both tech stacks to maintain data parity during the transition period.

Like telecom, airlines face the need to change their system of record to enable their commercial strategies. The PNR object touches nearly every aspect of airline operations, making any change high-stakes. Lessons from telecom show that airlines could strive to achieve two objectives early on: prove end-to-end execution of the new systems and validate that its governance framework can scale. This governance sets the standards for data objects, integration patterns and operational principles that all future connections will follow. Internal systems will rely on it, and so will a wide range of external providers such as retailing partners and service providers. Achieving this milestone shortens the transition and reduces the risk and cost of running two platforms in parallel.

Jorge Velasco Azoños, Travel in Motion AG

References

Pinterest

• Lenny Rachitsky, 2025. The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest). Lenny’s Newsletter. Available at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-hierarchy-of-engagement-sarah (Accessed 8 August 2025).
• Tavel, S. (2017) ‘Five lessons from scaling Pinterest’, Medium, 27 March. Available at: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/five-lessons-from-scaling-pinterest-6a699a889b08 (Accessed: 8 August 2025).
• Tavel, S. (2023) ‘Don’t Fall Into the Trap of Taking the Wrong Lessons from Others’ Success’, Sarah Tavel’s Newsletter, 14 July. Available at: https://www.sarahtavel.com/p/dont-fall-into-the-trap-of-taking (Accessed: 8 August 2025).

Monzo

• Monzo (2023) What we learned from 43 experiments in 12 months. Available at: https://monzo.com/blog/2023/03/28/what-we-learned-from-43-experiments-in-12-months (Accessed: 12 August 2025).
• Monzo (2023) How we launch new products at Monzo. Available at: https://monzo.com/blog/2023/
• Monzo (2023) Today we’re launching Monzo Investments. Available at: https://community.monzo.com/t/today-we-re-launching-monzo-investments/153181 (Accessed: 12 August 2025).
• Monzo (2025) Invest in what matters to you. Available at: https://monzo.com/investments (Accessed: 12 August 2025).

Orange (Europe)

• TM Forum. 2021. IG1133C Federated Catalogs for (Automated) Procurement — Orange Case Study. Available at: https://www.tmforum.org/resources/exploratory-report/ig1133c-federated-catalogs-for-automated-procurement-orange-case-study-r15-0-1/ (Accessed: 14 August 2025).
• Orange Business. 2025. Orange Business accelerates its digital transformation with leading technology partners to deliver simplified digital experiences for customers. Available at: https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-accelerates-its-digital-transformation-leading-technology-partners-deliver (Accessed: 14 August 2025).
• Oracle and TM Forum. n.d. TM Forum: Attaining Agility. Available at: https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/industries/communications/tm-forum-attaining-agility.pdf (Accessed: 14 August 2025).

Airlines are risk averse. Everybody knows that, right? And rightly so – safety and risk management in the aviation industry is something that must be taken seriously. Ensuring safe operations is the single most important topic for any airline, and we as an industry collaborate to ensure that thousands of flights take off and land every day without incident – that is risk management (rather than aversion) at its finest. Part of ensuring safety in the air is having rock-solid IT systems on the ground that enable this – flight planning, flight operations management, weight and balance and so on. Indeed, airlines have historically been pioneers in running large-scale IT operations that could support a global business operating non-stop around the clock. But now, when we are talking about modernising airline IT, some of these airline applications look a bit, well… clunky. As with many that are pioneers, you often get overtaken by others that learn from your early mistakes. Or you reach a level of maturity that becomes costly and difficult to disentangle. As an industry, we have known this for years, probably decades – while we still have our monolithic reservation systems, the world of IT has moved on dramatically. Pretty much everything has “gone digital” – how we listen to music, watch TV, how we bank, how we shop, how we dress ourselves and even how we meet the love of our life.

How has this been made possible? Well, the advent of the internet helped of course, but more critically the way we build and run software applications has fundamentally changed. Cloud computing has enabled a degree of agility in building software that was not present ten, or even five years ago. Nowadays, a new digital services company can bring its product to market in a matter of months, sometimes even quicker. In the airline industry, sometimes implementing a new SSR can take longer. A new codeshare partnership? Let’s not go there. New cabin products? Ok, let’s stop with the scary examples J

While airlines have managed to “go digital” to a certain degree, the core is still old and clunky (some older and clunkier than others, but still in relative terms “old”). So, when we talk about changing these core systems, we realise that we maybe do not have the agility that other, younger industries may have. The monolithic nature of the airline IT landscape certainly does not make transforming easier, although here we come back to the topic of airlines and “risk aversion”. We spend a lot of time talking with airlines and vendors about transformation – where to start, what is the value, where is there least risk? How do we break down this “legacy” technology stack into manageable chunks? There is a perception that the airline retailing transformation journey is a path frought with danger, that it is something akin to the “knife-edge” PSS migrations that we all love to reminisce about (but wouldn’t want to repeat). Indeed, given that one possible (and, for some at least, desirable) outcome of the transformation is a more modular IT landscape, it is a clever tactic of some incumbents to paint this picture (“better the devil you know”). But is this really the case? Is the airline retailing transformation such a mammoth undertaking that it could threaten the commercial existence of an airline? (We used to say that if an airline was unable to operate for more than a handful of days, they would be out of business). While some may see it this way, I don’t think so – I think this is rather a case of us (as an industry) falling back to our “risk averse” way of thinking. Yes, there will be risks along the way, but the key to making the journey as risk-free as possible is having the right mindset. Risks should not stop us taking bold moves – we just have to play the game with careful consideration. Disentangling the legacy wiring of our industry will take years – we all understand this. But if we break this down into manageable, bite-sized chunks, we not only make progress more quickly but also reduce the risks as much as possible. We make small steps that have a low impact, manage this carefully, learn from the approach and repeat the exercise. Indeed, some airlines we work with are already on this journey – taking the first steps to bypass some legacy processes and tech to prove out the feasibility of their Offer and Order transition approaches.

So yes – airlines may be risk averse, however that’s not the same as being change averse. The airline retailing transformation will involve risk, but that does not mean the journey is something to fear — it’s something to manage, deliberately and thoughtfully. Just as we already manage risk every day in operations, compliance and safety, we can apply that same discipline to our commercial technology. The journey toward modern retailing is not a single leap, but a series of deliberate steps — tested, learned from and repeated. And many airlines are already on this path, bypassing legacy constraints to explore what’s possible in Offer and Order transformation.

If you’d like to explore how to take the first steps (or the next ones), we’d be happy to talk.

Nick Stott, Travel in Motion AG

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

In a market defined by fragmentation, flexibility, and digitally empowered consumers, traditional airline loyalty models are under pressure. Frequent flyer programs today are struggling to keep pace with the modern traveller’s expectations and behaviour.

Here’s a strategic provocation: What if an airline offered loyalty incentives to travellers who haven’t flown with them yet? Not based on historical miles, but on demonstrated travel behaviour, regardless of carrier. A concept I’ll call: Traveler Status. 

It’s a radical twist on acquisition, loyalty, and data-driven engagement. But it may be exactly what airlines need to win the next generation of high-frequency, low-commitment travellers.

Airline loyalty programs were built for a different time. A time when corporate travellers booked weeks in advance, stuck to one alliance, and were easily incentivised by elite tiers, upgrades, and lounge access. But today:

• Many travellers prioritise convenience, flexibility, and price over brand loyalty.
• They book across carriers based on schedule logic, not allegiance.
• And they frequently use meta-search, OTAs, and fare alerts to optimise each booking.

Importantly, this group includes a large segment of high-value, high-frequency travellers, who remain largely untapped by traditional loyalty mechanics.

The core idea behind Traveler Status is simple: Reward travel behaviour, not airline loyalty.

Rather than requiring customers to prove their value over time, airlines can proactively identify and engage high-frequency travellers, even if those travellers haven’t yet flown with them. Here’s how it might work:

• The traveller opts in to share flight history (via apps, digital receipts, or travel aggregators).
• The airline uses this behavioural data to assess the traveller’s value and preferences.
• In return, the airline extends entry-level benefits (e.g., preferred seating, priority boarding, bonus points, dynamic fare offers).

It’s not about giving away the house. It’s about meeting the traveller where they are and giving them a reason to switch. From a commercial and customer acquisition standpoint, the model is compelling.

1. Data-Driven Prospecting: Traveler Status creates a new segmentation layer, verified, active travellers who haven’t yet entered your loyalty funnel. It’s precision targeting at the top of the funnel.
2. Competitive Displacement: By understanding where travellers are currently spending (routes, carriers, class), you can craft tailored offers designed to win share from competitors.
3. Accelerated Onboarding into Loyalty Ecosystems: Instead of waiting for behaviour to trigger rewards, this model reverses the incentive flow, encouraging new customers to engage meaningfully from day one.
4. Reinforcing a Retail Mindset: Traveler Status aligns with IATA’s modern retailing vision of personalised offers, dynamic bundles, and customer-centric experiences driven by insight rather than inertia.

Of course, introducing Traveler Status isn’t just a marketing initiative, it requires alignment across data, commercial strategy, and digital channels. Consider this:

• Privacy and Data Sharing: Clear opt-in mechanisms and trust-based value exchanges are essential.
• Offer Design: Benefits must be attractive enough to incentivize switching, but sustainable and scalable.
• Behavioural Analytics: Airlines will need robust tooling to analyse shared travel data and generate meaningful, contextual offers.
• Conversion Attribution: Linking Traveler Status offers to actual booking behaviour will be key to measuring ROI.

At its core, Traveler Status reflects a new philosophy: Don’t wait for loyalty. Create conditions where loyalty can begin. It recognizes that the most valuable travellers aren’t necessarily the ones who have flown with you before, they’re the ones who could fly with you next. In a world where competition is one click away and customer expectations are shaped by digital-native retailers, airlines must think like modern retailers too. That means rethinking loyalty not as a reward for the past, but as an incentive for future intent. The opportunity here isn’t just conceptual. It’s first-mover advantage. Traveler Status is a model that rewards strategic bravery. It requires airlines to challenge legacy program constructs in favour of smarter acquisition, deeper personalization, and long-term engagement. For the airline willing to go first, it could mean transforming the very nature of loyalty, from a backward-looking reward system to a forward-looking growth engine. Because in the end, the best loyalty programs don’t wait for customers to be loyal, they give them a reason to start!

Catarina Silva, Travel in Motion AG

Dear reader, you can probably guess how much, as a consultant in the travel industry, I am made to travel. Now, add to it a wife determined to discover all corners of the world, and you’ll understand why my body has got more used to an airplane seat than my own bed for sleeping.

This is all to say, I am a frequent traveller, coming with all the usual perks. I know to avoid having any luggage, my laptop bag fits neatly on top of my carry-on, and I have my perfect suite of gadgets for before, during and after the flight, which I have now perfected over the years (yes, that can be detailed in a future blog post).

We all know the airline industry is currently undergoing a massive transformation, leaving the legacy world of EDIFACT distribution and moving into a more customer-centric, Offer & Order world. And I cannot wait to see the Order part of said transition… take flight (forgive the pun).

Better servicing capabilities

The first reason I’m cautiously optimistic, is the new capabilities associated to the Order itself. Imagine landing after a delayed flight, fully aware that you’re too late for your next boarding, and immediately getting notifications containing rebooking options without even needing to go wait in a queue for an agent to handle this. This level of proactive, personalised service simply wasn’t possible in the old EDIFACT world, but it’s becoming the new standard as technology evolves. Also, airlines can now access a more complete view of each customer’s preferences and travel history, which means these rebooked services can be tailored to my preferences (how about offering me a window seat and wifi, as a way of apology for the stress caused).

Better door-to-door experience

A second major benefit is the potential for a true door-to-door travel experience. With richer data and integrated systems, airlines and their partners can coordinate everything from airport transfers to hotel check-ins, making the journey smoother and more seamless. No more juggling separate reservations or wondering if your ride will show up-soon, a single itinerary could cover my entire trip, with real-time updates and support every step of the way. For frequent travelers like myself, this shift promises to turn travel days from a logistical headache into a genuinely enjoyable experience, with a single place to manage all steps of the journey. And, going back to the servicing capabilities: should any delay happen in any step of the travel, that single place should be able to offer options to accommodate them.

Better tracking, leading to better advertising

I have spoken about delays a fair bit in the previous sections, but the fact is, I’m an “early arriver” at the airport. In fact, very often, I end up with at least an hour to wait within the airport, before my flight starts to board. With the new Order capabilities, the airlines will be informed at every step of my journey, including wait times. This should allow for personalised (based on historical data) advertisement, such as special shops and restaurant offers, lounge suggestions, etc… I look forward to receiving an advertisement for a lounge that also guarantees there is still room in said lounge. Like it or not, advertisements are everywhere, and on a personal level, I would rather have them tailored to me, rather than receiving a 5% discount on diapers that I will of course ignore.

The Geeky side

The idea of this transition allowing for a lot more features in an IoT (Internet of Things) concept is extremely interesting. Picture this: after passing the security gate, I receive the indication of where the lounge is, how full it is, and possibly a discount. Plus, while walking towards it, as I pass next to shops and restaurants, I’m getting information about what they offer. All these systems are interacting, sending information from one to another, and working together to offer a more streamlined and possibly personalised journey for the traveller. Oh, and if it can remind me that my wife’s journey is next week and that this duty-free store sells jewellery, all the better. Although one could wonder where to put the privacy boundaries…

The Dark Side

And that’s where this all leads: where is the line? Is it okay that airlines are now getting more efficient at tracking us, using our historical data, and interconnecting information to push better advertisements our way? I do not plan to get into the ethics of things in this blog post –  rather, I share my own views. I don’t mind all this if it ends up enhancing my overall experience. But, as with a lot of these systems, I still recognise that there is a strong need for transparency for the traveller as to what data is used, processed, stored… And the possibility, should the traveller wish it, to turn it off.

Airlines, I hope you are reading this. And I hope, as a traveller, that you will implement these features soon, making my future trips a better experience. We live in a world that has gotten used to being online 24/7, and it is high time that you make full use of it.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

Amman. It’s 1800 on a Friday and I’m making my way to Bangkok for a conference after having a week holidaying. This is an unusual routing for me, and the chance to try out a new airline. However, I have a ten hour stopover, and even after working through the inbox after a week out of the office, there are still eight or so hours to kill before my departure at sometime in the middle of the night. Many of us have been in the industry years or decades and are seasoned travellers – we have our routines, we know how to kill time at the airport. Our experience though sometimes taints our way of looking at the world when travelling. Ten hours, though, gives a lot of time to observe the average traveller – those that maybe only travel once or twice a year, or are not so digitially savvy as some of use.

Looking around me, I see a lot of untapped demand. The airport is typically a place where airlines try not lose money (through delays causing missed connections, lost bags, overbooked flights and so on), while trying to offset this with maximum conversion prior to commencing the journey. Some will remember the excitement around the use of beacons around the airport, tracking passengers and bombarding them with offers as they strolled through duty free. However, that never really took off as the airlines, airports and ground handlers could never agree on “who owns the customer”. Now though, airlines are “going digital” and hoping to open up a world of possibilities to their passengers. So what would that look like, in real terms? For reasons well known, there is an enormous disconnect between the world of airline commercial retailing and the hard reality of life at the airport, particularly at the gate. But there are a lot of needs at the airport, and while the airline can’t fulfill all of these, some could be with a little more integration and joined-up thinking. I’d like to know where my bags are, for one thing. I’d like to be assured that those extra couple of kilos on my hand luggage are not going to cause me a problem. The lady rushing to the front of the plane upon arrival would have really appreciated some info on her connection (and later, on her bags too!). However, is there revenue in addressing these examples? Potentially, yes – directly (I would be happy to pay for extra kilos of hand luggage) and indirectly, through making the travel experience less stressful. Most airline mobile apps, with the exception of a few, are extremely commercially focussed – they are intented primarily as booking channels and also allow you to check-in. If I compare that with my banking apps, that is the equivalent of simply being able to scan a bill and pay an invoice. But my banking app allows me to do so much more – I can block cards if I think I have misplaced them, set up new accounts, change payment limits, usage locations and so on. In an older blog, we talked about airline super-apps and whether they could help airlines take more wallet share, and as a result own (or at least have insight into) more of the journey. The more an airline knows about you and why (and where) you’re travelling to as well, the more it can take informed decisions and interact proactively through channels such as the airline app. However, the elephant in the room of airline siloed data and the lack of realtime integration between airline IT applications remains. We still live in a world of “if only we could…”, which brings up the other elephant in the (rather large) room – the lack of integrated business processes and the organisations that own them. The shift to Offers and Orders aims to change this, however at the moment we (as an industry) have only added a layer of complexity on top (NDC) but this has not yet driven any change downstream. If Spotify were an airline, they’d be streaming to their subscribers from vinyl records – it’s a nice, shiny layer on top of something very outdated (but still dear to many people’s hearts!). Sometimes this is something that goes forgotten when we, as an industry, try to drive change. We can spend an eternity talking about PNRs, tickets, NDC offers and orders, but the end consumer doesn’t care about any of this – they just want the travel experience to get better. The Offer and Order transformation is a huge undertaking for all players, airlines and IT vendors alike, however sometimes we look at it as an enormous IT project rather than a chance to make something … better.

Because ultimately, isn’t that what digital transformation should be about? Taking friction out of the journey. Helping the traveller feel informed, reassured, even delighted rather than simply monetised. When we talk about retailing in aviation, too often the focus is purely transactional: how to push more ancillaries, how to improve attach rates, how to nudge up conversion. But true retailing is about relevance, timing and trust. It’s about putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right moment – and that moment might be during a long stopover, not just at time of booking.

Imagine an airport experience where your app knows your context. You’ve just landed, your next flight is eight hours away, you’re tired and a bit hungry. Your app suggests a shower room, offers you a discount at a lounge or lets you bid for a business upgrade that might help you get some sleep on the next leg. It tells you where your bag is, gives you real-time updates on your gate and nudges you when your flight is starting to board – not because a timer says so, but because you’re seated at the far end of the terminal.

These things sound simple, even obvious – but they require a level of integration and intelligence that we as an indus are still working towards. And yet, these small details are valuable. A less stressful experience means a happier customer, more receptive to offers, more likely to return. That’s how we start turning the airport from a source of cost and chaos into a place of opportunity – for both revenue and reputation.

So maybe the goal shouldn’t be just to “go digital”, or to “implement Offers and Orders”, or “modernise airline retailing”. Maybe the goal should be to make travel feel less like a test and more like a treat. And if we can do that – thoughtfully, collaboratively, with the passenger truly in mind – then maybe next time I’ve got ten hours to kill, it won’t feel like killing time at all.

Nick Stott, Travel in Motion AG

The Importance of Airline Payment

Airline payment remains a prominent topic of discussion within airline commercial and financial teams.

As McKinsey[1] summarised back in 2022, airline payment costs sum up to USD20 billion annually, representing up to three percent of airline revenues – a significant value in an industry that often only achieves a very low profitability. The volume is huge, with about three billion transactions per year facilitating a turnover of about one trillion dollars.

It is too easy to view airline payment simply as a cost factor. The handling of payment is an important part of the customer experience, and McKinsey also assumes that up to USD12 billion in additional revenues can be achieved for airlines annually if consumers can make payment more easily and efficiently in numerous ways.

Of course, the true values of these numbers can be discussed, but it is obvious that airlines need to focus on their capabilities to receive payment in an easy, inexpensive and safe way.

Airline Payment as an Enabler for an Airline’s Strategy

To achieve this, airlines often implement “payment strategies”. Personally, I am struggling a bit with the term “strategy” when it comes to airline payment. After running numerous airline payment engagements, I believe that there is no “airline payment” strategy per se. Payment need to contribute and be embedded into an overall airline commercial strategy and is a key business enabler ideally increasing conversion while reducing cost and risk.

Airlines’ overall strategies can be fundamentally different, such as if the airline follows a full-service carrier (FSC) business model or, at the other extreme, that of a pure low-cost carrier (LCC) with no frills. This has direct implications for airline payment and needs to be assessed case by case.

In addition, there might be shorter term airline strategies that have an impact on how to run payment. An airline may decide to enter a new market and therefore focus on high conversions by taking a higher payment risk, as well as for instance enabling local APMs, leading to higher complexities.

In essence, these approaches are defined by the airline’s strategy and not by the payment process. Therefore, they cannot be regarded as solely a payment strategy since airline payment is “only” the enabler of the overall strategy.

However, how is a payment set up embedded into the overall commercial strategy? Let me share a real-life step-by-step project approach, which has delivered the desired results.

 A phased Approach to embed Airline Payment

First, we analyse and audit the current payment setup, by taking a closer look at the balance between conversion, risk and cost. It also makes sense to investigate the organisational setup of the payment team, e.g., does it reside in finance, e-commerce, distribution or even sales? Addressing other questions such as how the payment architecture looks, who are the main payment suppliers and how they are governed, is also essential. By benchmarking the results, airlines will often be able to gain some tactical quick wins.

In the second step, the overall airline commercial strategy is taken into consideration. What are the guidelines and requirements for payments to enable the overall commercial strategy? What would a strategically fitting payment setup look like? What are the gaps between the desired state and the status quo? How do we get there?

Thirdly, the exercise should focus on implementation and execution. With the view on the current set up, the desired state for payment fully supporting the airline commercial strategy, a detailed roadmap to close the gaps can be established and executed, through change management. At this stage several questions can be addressed such as organisational structures, make or buy decisions, vendor and partner selections, just to name a few.

Of course, there is no recipe that fits all airlines when it comes to their payments. But with the overall approach summarised above, airlines can enhance their payment process through enhancing conversion while reducing cost and risk, with the ultimate goal to be the enabler for the airline’s commercial strategy – payments are there to support, but they are not a strategy by themselves.

[1] McKinsey Sep. 2022 – Airline retailing: How payment innovation can improve the bottom line

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

I know, I know. Yet another article on AI. Believe me, I am as fed up with these as you, but bear with me a second, as I truly believe this is an important topic to be discussed. In short: AI is here. Whether you’ve used it to generate an image of a panda bear riding a bicycle on the moon, for work purposes, or read AI-generated text, chances are, you have already interacted with it many, many times.

Similarly, chances are, you are at least a bit familiar with airline processes. And of course, the airline industry is also subject to change, due to all these new AI practices.

In this article, we will focus on Airline Distribution, from the shopping, to the servicing of airline tickets. In other words, if you came here to read how AI is going to replace pilots, sorry, but you’re in the wrong place.

1. Selling, upselling and servicing through AI

Offer Generation

As with any new IT-based technology, the first focus for AI has been increasing sales. As such, AI is now being shoehorned into dynamic pricing and dynamic offer solutions, allowing for better, more granular customer segmentation and ensuring a more relevant offering to be presented to the end customer. Due to its massive power on data analytics, including customer preferences, booking history and market trends, airlines can dynamically adjust their shopping responses to better fit the requests, thus increasing conversion rates and total revenues. This approach also allows for more automation, making the airline’s fare filing more lean, allowing for fewer rules updates and less granular fare management.

Customer Care

Airlines intend to be more customer-centric. At least, that’s one of the main buzzwords we hear at the various conventions we attend. Part of this comes from the airline’s tailored offerings, as mentioned earlier, while next comes the handling of said customer. We all have wasted hours of our life, listening to a five-second music loop, waiting for a customer care agent to finally hear our complaints. Airlines intend to solve this by re-introducing chatbots, now AI-powered. These chatbots allow for guidance on the exchange or cancellation of tickets, ancillary sales and general questions an end user may have regarding their booking. Natural language processing is getting better and better, including multiple languages, allowing for airlines to serve a larger set of customers. One example of this approach is LivePerson, which already provides such capabilities for Azul Airlines, even allowing for upsell through a chatbot interface. Naturally, this does not remove the need for actual customer care agents, but allows for a “first filter”, replacing that oh-so-annoying music with actual discussion and letting agents focus on relevant use cases.

2. AI Agents

AI-ready API

More and more airlines nowadays provide an NDC API to interact with their content. AI agents are a new technology, capable of interacting with APIs. The first examples might seem small, such as being able to order an Uber by asking Gemini. These AI-based agents learn API interaction through various manners, one of which is machine-readable documentation. For a smoother integration, airlines should ensure all documentation is up-to-date with detailed examples, as these allow AI agents to be quickly trained and to interact with your NDC API.

Convin is one such example, offering voice-based search and flight reservations. But do not mistake voice recognition and AI: AI agents can also be triggered by text-based inputs, and chatbots are now being reinvented with AI to better understand requests and search through airline offerings.

3. The impact… Shopping volumes and OTA impact

Airlines have recently discovered what it means to be an API provider, through NDC. One of the constraints that come from offering APIs is that the airline is not always in control of API usage. In other terms, that dreaded look-to-book ratio is an important factor to consider when providing a shopping API to agencies and aggregators.

AI will now bring a new spin to this, as these AI agents will go through the web for every single search, greatly increasing costs associated with API management and, yes, look-to-book ratios.

The combination of airlines wanting to provide dynamic, tailored offerings, and AI agents scouring the web will result in an increase of look-to-book that few airlines are prepared for today.

While we are here focusing on the airline view of these AI agents, OTAs have been taking a close look at them as well. PhocusWire has a great article, presenting their risks for OTAs: https://www.phocuswire.com/ai-agents-future-of-online-travel-agency .

In short, the airline industry is now entering (willingly or not) a new era of distribution. AI agents scouring the web, looking for AI-created offerings and end-users being served by AI-based chatbots will soon become the norm, and, ironically all with the intent to become more customer-centric. Airlines that do not have AI-ready APIs may end up not integrating properly in AI agents’ search results, potentially leading to revenue loss through missed sales opportunities. And the ones that are not ready for the surge of search request created by these agents may see a huge increase in associated costs. So, airlines…

AI is here. Are you ready for it?

References and great reads on the subject:

• LivePerson, Take flight with AI: https://www.liveperson.com/blog/airline-digital-transformation/
• The New Stack , It’s time to start preparing APIs for the AI Agent Era: https://thenewstack.io/its-time-to-start-preparing-apis-for-the-ai-agent-era/
• Play, AI Agent APIs: A Comprehensive Guide: https://play.ht/blog/ai-agent-apis/
• Convin AI Voice Agents for Flight Search: https://convin.ai/blog/flight-ticket-booking-online
• Cognigy, AI Agents for Customer Service: https://www.cognigy.com/solutions/airlines-travel

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

An important step towards a greener planet: Since 2023 Travel in Motion is operated in a CO2 balanced way. This means that our greenhouse gas emissions are reduced as much as possible and that we offset the remaining emissions with equivalent climate actions. We are only a very small organisation – however we travel a lot by air for our work with customers and partner. Therefore, also our contribution to stop climate change is important!

No doubt, commercial airline operations are going through one of the biggest evolutions in decades. Disintermediation continues to take place as traditional GDS-based distribution is increasingly replaced by distribution through new, often NDC-based, channels. In addition, customer-centric airline retailing is removing the legacy concept of trip-based commercial processes.

This leads to the replacement of well-established system environments such as Passenger Service Systems (PSS), which have been around for often thirty or forty years, by modern Offer and Order-based airline retailing platforms. These platforms are built on modern modular architectures, consisting of numerous single components. Therefore, the evolution of our industry is not only going through a path towards modern and customer-centric retailing, but also through a strategic path to substitute legacy, monolithic PSS by modern and modular systems.

In the upcoming world of Offers and Orders, airlines truly have the possibility to execute a “best of breed” approach when it comes to choosing components for their commercial IT landscape. In the traditional legacy PSS world, most of the commercial systems are provided by the PSS provider. Of course, there have always been individual components where solutions from highly specialised providers were used, such as Revenue Management or Revenue Accounting, but it is true to state that most of the commercial applications were provided by the PSS supplier. Therefore, airlines had little opportunity to bring together a solution environment that was provided by a heterogeneous vendor community. The need to integrate solutions was limited, business continuity was the job of a single supplier, and an airline CIO only (more or less) had to manage a single, albeit dominant IT partner. The legacy world was easy, but choice was limited.

Now we aim for a different paradigm. Modularity is key when it comes to Offer and Order-based commercial systems. Different components need to be integrated and work with systems often from competing suppliers, service levels need to be maintained in a multi-vendor set up, all based on an enterprise architecture which needs to be owned (or at least controlled) by the airline. However, this also leads to opportunities for airlines. Airlines can execute a real “best of breed” approach, choosing those systems and components that make most sense for them. The bespoke modular set up enables airlines to better differentiate and, in all consequences, also to provide “their flavour” to the customer experience. It is yet to be seen which airlines will make best use of this new freedom, as they individually need to balance complex, heterogeneous systems and the best individual set of solutions.

However, what does this mean for the IT vendor community? Until now the PSS market has been dominated by two major providers, Amadeus and Sabre (not considering Travelsky with their local dominance in mainland China). While this may be over-simplifying things a little, the commercial airline IT world could be separated into “Amadeus carriers”, “Sabre carriers” and “all others”. Providers of point solutions had to either integrate into the one or the other, if they were chosen over the PSS provider for a specific solution. Integration was often based on the APIs and other standards the PSS provider enforced.

And with Offer and Order management? Of course, on the vendor side of the equation, the big market players are aiming to provide a solution stack that covers all (or at least most) of the functionality an airline requires for their commercial operations. However, a lot of airlines are planning to make use of the new freedom of components and plan to choose solutions from different suppliers. This is driven by both a desire to break the transition into manageable chunks as well as constructing the ideal portfolio of solutions. Besides the complexity that the airlines need to handle for such a construct, the IT vendors also now need to re-think their interaction with their peers:

• Vendors need to become more open to collaborate with each other, including joint project planning and taking joint responsibility towards airline delivery.
• There is a difference between modularity and openness. A system environment provided by a single supplier can be modular but not open to third-party solutions. This applies not only to technical capabilities such as interfaces or open APIs, it also covers commercial terms. We have often experienced that the utilisation and integration of a third-party solution has been made commercially unfeasible by the main supplier, through extra (sometimes hidden) fees or other contractual terms such as weak service level agreements.
• IATA is defining the standards for Offer and Order management systems, but are they detailed enough for vendors to easily integrate on a module level?
• Airline first. Just as airlines are focusing on the customer, vendors should fundamentally shift their focus to serving the airline, even if this leads to some (short term) missed revenue opportunities. In the long run, airlines will most probably honour this, and it will be to the benefit of the vendor.

We will see over the next three to four years if modularity leads to openness and real airline-focused vendor cooperation. Or to put it differently, how will the new balance between “the winner (vendor) takes all” and “true collaboration in an open and modular world to best support airlines” play out? Whether you’re an airline, a vendor or just would like to explore this journey further, feel free to reach out to us!

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

2024 has been an exciting year in airline distribution, with major developments for airlines and the travel tech industry.
Read Oystin‘s Distribution Insights 2024 to learn more about these developments and our take on upcoming trends.
Click here and download our comprehensive Distribution Insights 2024.


Our Distribution Insights contain:
– Our take on future trends
– The major airline developments in different regions of the world
– Deep-dives into American Airlines’ and Ryanair’s distribution strategies
– A comparison of GDS and their recovery since the pandemic
– A spotlight on the major tech providers, aggregators, and travel sellers

We hope you enjoy the Distribution Insights 2024, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. Wishing all a joyful holiday season and a great start to 2025.

The industry has made progress

Over the past years the airline industry has been working towards the concept of Offers and Orders to support the initiative referred to as Modern Airline Retailing. For the uninformed, there are plenty of articles and papers outlining both, so we won’t explain the two terms in this article.

Over the past two months, there have been three major industry conferences focusing on the airline commercial areas – retail, distribution, loyalty, payments, ancillaries and other related topics. What has become apparent is the progress which has been made in the last 12 to 24 months in these areas. Both the airlines and the solution providers are working towards the aim of business process re-engineering and moving in the direction of solutions which are more like ecommerce and digital retail solutions.

A perspective on how the domains will develop

While TiM uses its own solution capability blueprint with a somewhat more refined set of domains, for the sake of simplicity we will refer to the common four – Offer, Order, Settle and Deliver. The status of maturity of these domains varies considerably, with Offer being the most mature, followed by Order. Both Settle and Deliver are less developed, from both the perspective of vendor products as well as business process re-engineering. This gap is largely attributable to the flow of events in the retail, deliver, settle and fulfilment chain of events.

Looking into 2025 for each domain our expectation for each of them is as follows:

Offer – Airlines will continue to work towards higher offer maturity with a focus on dynamic offers – more specifically, dynamic and contiuous pricing. Increasing offer maturity is an “easy” revenue case to make, and there are plenty of solutions in the market. The vendors are enhancing their solutions in the same area, with some focusing additionally on segmentation and contextual selling as well as more advanced bundling capabilities. Another focus area in 2025 will certainly also be the Product Catalugue and the Stock Keeper.

Order – There are a handful of airlines experimenting with increasing the use of Orders. This is being driven either by airlines using a vendor which already supports components of the order, or their PSS vendor has built initial order structures independent from the PNR, ETKT and EMD as part of their roadmap. We use the term “experimenting” as there are no (full-service) airlines using the order fully yet, including servicing, feeding the order data to accounting and settlement flows, managing involuntary changes and doing journey management with it. The coming year will see an increase in maturity and the first airlines expanding the use of Order Management from a pure order storage to having the ability to work with the order.

Settle – In this domain, there are a number of very solid proof of concept implementatons with integration between Order Management Systems and Order Accounting solutions. The first airlines are testing the use of order accounting capabilities by not issuing EMDs for certain ancillaries. This simplification will help the Order Accounting vendors solidify their solutions and give the airlines the opportunity to learn new processes and truly identify the benefits, especially in terms of revenue leakage avoidance.

Deliver – In TiM’s opinion, this is the domain which will still require the most focus. The Deliver domain also has added complexity as it is closest to the airline’s operations and must work extremely reliably. Furthermore, there are potentially the largest number of other stakeholders which will influence this area – ground handlers, airport authorities, governments, biometric solution providers and many more. However, there are also a great number of opportunities here when we think ahead to the “touhchless airport” of the future, where dwell time is minimised or, for those who wish, dwell time is turned into a shopping, productive or relaxation experience as opposed to queues of people at check-in, security and immigration.

What are the vendors up to?

The logical answer may be that they are developing the solutions above. While this statement is indeed very true, the picture is not quite as straightforward as that. Various vendors are taking different approaches, with some having decided to go “all-in” and develop across the four domains (and beyond, in some cases). Others have decided that they are better focusing on a few key components (the ones they know best) and look for partners in others, building an ecosystem of like-minded solution providers. Others still have taken the risk of advancing into new areas, trying to expand to cover areas such as payment or the Deliver domain. In addition to this, we are still seeing a lot of new entrants, especially for niche or partial solutions. A lot of these new entrants focus on the use of artificial intelligence, especially in the pricing and revenue management domain.

While we think each vendor is unique and has business drivers and strategies guiding their direction, TiM believes that there must be a greater level of collaboration amongst the vendors. We understand the vendors compete with one another, and this must remain so. However, as an industry, we need to ensure that we don’t all run in different directions when building out new capabilities or components. How such an alignment between vendors, for example to agree on intra-component interfaces would look, is food for thought for us and the vendor community.

TiM’s Take

The journey to Offers and Orders is a long one, and we may well publish outlook articles like this for a few years to come. While not all areas are progressing at the same speed, we do not feel that is currently an issue. Most airlines that we work with directly or are discussing the transition with are taking a step-by-step approach. Typically, airlines start with some component of Offer as this is where it is easiest to demonstrate value, and most solutions are available. Offer enhancements are then followed by Order, often to enable even more progress on the Offer side. With a base level of Order competence in place, the airlines will then start considering both the Settle and Service Delivery domains. This is very much in line with the maturity scale, and we can assume that the maturity of the different domains has been driven by customer needs – meaning the airlines’ needs and requests to the vendors.

For airlines who have not yet started at all but would like to get familiar with Offers and Orders, we are more than happy to offer our two-day primer – an onsite training session covering all the basic understanding necessary, including risks, challenges, guidance on how to define a business case, future-state scenarios, the state of the industry and finally, how a transition could be planned.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG

The airline industry has started moving from legacy Passenger Service System (PSS) focused commercial IT operations to a customer-centric offer and order-based retailing environment. Through our engagements, we know that this is a complex undertaking involving internal airline departments, traditional distribution entities and partner airlines, just to name a few stakeholders, often with conflicting interests and agendas. And, of course, IT plays an important role here and is often a key entity when it comes to decision making.

Sometimes it is not very explicit that the migration to offer and order also manifests a fundamental change in IT architecture: from monolithic environments to a modular set up, from functions to services, from legacy IT to modern architecture and from classical hosting in dedicated data centers to cloud-based IT operations.

When I started my career in airline IT, running a PSS host was the highlight of every data center operation. The Swissair data center was the core of its airline IT and the pride of most of Swissair’s IT staff. The (at the time mostly) guys running it were some of the most reputable individuals in the IT department of the company, sometimes quite similar to the cast of pilots in the flying part of the airline.

However, the current evolution to offer and order is also core to triggering or accelerating the move to a cloud-based IT environment. The advantages of the cloud are widely known, such as scalability to grow and “breathe” with volatile market requirements, highest availability of services combined with a latency that is now negligible, all operated in a highly secure environment and driven by continuous improvement processes. These advantages also come with an relative overall reduction in CO₂ emissions when compared to the on-premise hosting model. Of course, big cloud data centers create large amounts of CO₂ as well, but it is generally accepted that the overall volume is lower than having the same computing power operated out of numerous smaller entities. Therefore, the need for an airline to operate a dedicated data center has vanished. The head of IT does not need to keep the data center secure and alive by “refreshing” it every three to five years to e.g., avoid security issues. This has also enabled the evolution of company IT leadership. The role of a head of IT or CIO has evolved into a role that drives enterprise-wide innovation by making an airline digital and customer focused.

However, moving to the cloud is more than optimizing IT operations. It is also a key element of the commercial transformation of an airline, because it can only become a true retailer if its IT system and application landscape enable this fundamental change. Both transformations, the “IT infrastructure” and the “commercial” one need to go hand in hand. The move to offer and order management is a particularly critical factor if this dual transformation: the airline becomes a retailer through its cloud based commercial IT systems.

Both transformations will not happen without initial efforts of finance, resources and management. They resemble the famous hockey stick picture – there is a lot of investment before the gains can be realized. However, the gains may come in earlier and at an increased rate, if a voyage is chosen where leveraging early commercial benefits might flatten (though probably not fully compensate) the required IT investments. Therefore, a business case should take this into consideration and frame the sequence of the transformation activities. We will probably not reach a scenario where the revenue increase of becoming a retailer will immediately pay for the IT transformation in full, but it may be able to contribute a lot, particularly in the early stages. This proves again that it can be very beneficial to look into the transformation from a holistic view, taking both the commercial and technological aspects into consideration.

The major vendors of airline offer and order management platforms and the big cloud providers manifest these interdependencies in their own partnership strategies. The three big cloud providers (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) are very active in the airline IT sector, especially in the offer and order management segment. They all not only have airline clients, but they also support major airline IT providers: AWS, who seems to be the biggest player in this area, works closely Accelya and IBS, Microsoft has a strong collaboration with Amadeus and PROS in place and Google works closely with Sabre – just to name a few publicly-known partnerships.

Will we ever reach cloud nine, as it is the place we want to be? Transforming an airline’s commercial and IT landscape is full of challenges, while fully making optimal use of it is an ongoing effort. But both challenges should be addressed jointly, and airlines should not sell themselves short by only considering the transition to offer and order or only looking at the IT cloud transformation. They should go hand in hand, based on an overall transformation strategy. Both paths need to be taken simultaneously and interdependently to reach ONE cloud nine – being a fully retailing airline driven by a cloud-based infrastructure.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

Our society is made of rankings

“Five stars”. “Recommended”. “Best hidden gem”. In today’s digital age, we tend to rank everything and refer to these ranks multiple times a day. From restaurants to gadgets, we are constantly bombarded with lists and reviews that claim to identify “the best”. I am no stranger to it, and while travelling, I often find myself searching for the best places to take photos, eat, etc. Ultimately, no matter how specific the search, I can be sure to find a large set of lists, all assuring me that they know exactly which one will suit me best. This phenomenon has created a self-enforcing loop of always wanting to select the best option available, whether it is for personal or professional use.

As a consultant in the airline retailing industry, I am frequently asked questions like “what is the best solution?”, “what is the best company?” or “what is the best approach?”. While these seem like straightforward questions, the reality is far more complex. The definition of “the best” varies significantly depending on the client’s unique needs, goals and circumstances. What works perfectly for one client might not be suitable for another, making it impossible to pinpoint a one-size-fits-all answer.

For instance, we have been looking at potential solutions for payment orchestration for airlines. One could think that the best Payment Orchestration Provider (POP) would be the one that supports the largest set of payment methods across the world, along with related features like fraud screening. However, looking at the actual markets where the airline operates made it clear that the relevance of some of those payment methods were entirely irrelevant. In other words, if your main markets are the US and Europe, you probably do not care about payment methods specific to Asia (and vice-versa).

The ”it depends” problem

So, how can we tackle this tricky question of “the best” and come up with a better answer than the laconic (and quite unhelpful) “it depends”?

In our view, the first step, before even looking at potential solutions to the question, is to properly define what “the best” truly means. To navigate this complexity, we can focus on three main criteria: cost, features, and timing.

1. Features: This criteria is often the first one that comes to mind when defining “the best”. The more feature-complete a product is and the more capabilities a solution brings to the table, the easier it is to get a clear definition of “best in class”. As a result, such a consideration is the most common approach to start contemplating a particular solution or product. But as indicated above, these features then need to be evaluated for their relevance and criticality. Therefore, listing these features is one thing, but prioritising them is even more important.
2. Cost: This is often the most important concern for airlines, and is usually in direct opposition to the “features-complete” argument. In short, the best option must fit within the budget constraints while still delivering value. Defining costs when evaluating approaches may be tricky, as it requires a thorough understanding of not only the implementation and operation costs, but also the potential reduction in costs due to the new solutions being implemented.
3. Timing/Quality: Lastly, the airline needs to clarify where it stands on the “time versus quality” scale. In the fast-paced airline industry, delays can lead to significant losses, making time a critical factor. However, any issue in a system is also a source of losses and reduced trust. Therefore, the best solution is often one that can meet tight deadlines with minimal compromises on quality, and airlines need to evaluate how much compromise they are willing to accept.

Once the airline has clear priorities on its requirements and a view on what truly matters when evaluating the solution, only then can we start looking at the solution. Depending on the topic, the airline may simply do an internal evaluation or start some heavier process, like running an RFP and thoroughly evaluating different approaches through detailed documentation and discussions. Then again, while these are useful means to evaluate solutions to a given problem, they may lead to the wrong conclusion without a rigorous definition of the airline’s priorities as a very first step.

Conclusion

To summarise, determining “the best” first requires a thorough evaluation of one’s priorities and specific requirements. It’s essential to move beyond the superficial allure of rankings and reviews and delve into what truly matters for your project, with regards to your own company. By carefully considering how relevant cost, features, quality and timing are for your project, you can make a more informed decision that aligns with your unique needs and goals. Remember, “the best” is not a universal constant but a variable that changes with context and perspective. At Travel in Motion, we will happily help you get clarity on these requirements, and walk with you on this evaluation journey, guiding you to finally answer: what is the best, for you.

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

We are proud to launch TiM Academy! TiM Academy is an online self-learning platform which covers topics related to commercial aviation. It is structured by curriculum, such as General Introduction to Civil Aviation, Airline Commercial Processes, Airline Distribution, NDC, Offer and Order Management, Revenue Management or Airline Commercial Systems. The number of curriculums keeps growing covering many different aviation domains. Each curriculum consists of courses that are made up by short modules. These modules are designed to provide a new self-learning experience with a duration of 10 to 15 minutes each.

• In the B2C environment, anyone can subscribe to individual courses and modules with a simple pricing and payment mechanism.
• For the B2B environment, we will setup your individual company learning space where you can manage users, TiM content and even your own content, and where we can hold blended learning sessions by expanding the online courses with webinars.

By structuring the TiM Academy content into digestible pieces we enable a flexible learning experience where you or your colleagues can learn at an individual pace. From a corporate learning and development perspective, trainings can be assigned to individuals and measured, and results be reported.

We are also very proud that we could engage some of the leading experts for TiM Academy. With this we ensure that each curriculum provides the depth for a perfect understanding, and that they are continuously kept up to date to reflect the pace of the industry evolution.

Are you interested in trying TiM Academy for free and with it a chance to win an iPad?

Sign up for free modules of the to TiM Academy here

and enjoy the new way of step-by-step learning, regardless of if you are new to our industry or if you want to stay aligned with the latest airline developments.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to TiM Academy, because knowledge makes the difference: create it – maintain it – grow it!

The road to Offer and Order: Airlines are making progress, as many have begun to tackle the design stage and IATA is providing support to help airlines resolve common issues.

If this is such a long and complex programme with incomplete standards and systems not yet fully designed, one could ask why even engage on such a long and arduous change programme.

Read our latest whitepaper about Offer and Order in 2025 and beyond, kindly supported by PROS.

DOWNLOAD THE WHITEPAPER HERE

Transitioning from one industry to another is never a straightforward path. It’s a journey filled with challenges, learning curves, and unexpected thrills. Coming from a finance background, I’ve spent years crunching numbers, analysing data, and making strategic decisions based on financial reports. The world of finance is intricate, logical, and, for the most part, predictable. When I decided to shift gears and enter the airline industry, I knew I was in for a whirlwind of change. What I didn’t expect was how exhilarating the ride would be.

The airline industry is a vast, dynamic ecosystem that operates on a global scale. It’s a world where customer experience, technology and operational efficiency converge. This industry is unlike any other, with its own set of rules, challenges and opportunities. Coming from a finance background, I had always associated creativity with fields like marketing, design or the arts. My previous work was heavily rooted in data analysis which is, frankly, not very creative. However, one of the most surprising aspects of transitioning into the airline industry has been discovering just how much creative thinking is required to succeed here in a way to find the best solution for the specific airline and find a way how to present it to the client in organised, yet engaging, manner.

One of the first things I realised was the sheer complexity of the industry. In finance, while complex, the systems are often centralised and standardised. The airline industry, on the other hand, is a patchwork of legacy systems, new technologies and industry standards that need to work together seamlessly. In addition, working with legacy systems alongside cutting-edge technology often involves creative problem-solving. Finding ways to integrate new solutions with existing infrastructure, or designing workarounds that maintain operational continuity, is as much an art as it is a science. This blend of creativity and technical skill is something that makes the work here incredibly rewarding. 

One of the first challenges I encountered was familiarising myself with the plethora of acronyms that dominate the airline industry. Terms like NDC, GDS, PSS, PNR and DCS were thrown around in meetings, leaving me scrambling to catch up. Many airlines still rely on decades-old systems for their core operations. As someone used to the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of finance technology, adapting to the slower pace of change in airline IT systems was a lesson in patience and understanding the importance of stability in operations.

The airline industry is moving towards a retail-oriented approach, where the traditional fare-based system is being replaced by a more flexible Offer and Order system. It’s exciting to be part of an industry at the cusp of such a significant change.

The People Make the Difference

While the technical aspects of the airline industry are fascinating, it is the people who make the transition truly unique. I have been fortunate to work with colleagues who are not only experts in their fields, but also incredibly supportive.

The airline industry is very collaborative and team oriented. My colleagues have gone above and beyond to help me get up to speed. They’ve patiently explained complex concepts, answered my endless questions, and provided guidance without overwhelming me with unnecessary details. It is also very helpful that each one of them comes with different knowledge and experience from different areas of the industry, which gives me insight into a wider scope of topics and insights.

This willingness to share knowledge and support newcomers is something I’ve come to deeply appreciate. It’s not just about getting the job done; it’s about bringing everyone along on the journey. This culture of mentorship and collaboration is something I’ve found to be highly emphasised in the airline industry.

Many conferences that the industry offers are a goldmine for anyone new to the industry. Networking at these events is instrumental in understanding the bigger picture of how the industry operates. Even though my first attendance at a conference is yet to happen, I am very much looking forward to engaging with professionals who have spent decades in the industry to provide me with insights that no textbook or online course could offer. These conferences highlight the importance of collaboration in the industry. Unlike finance, where competition can be cutthroat, the airline industry thrives on partnerships – be it between airlines, technology providers or regulatory bodies.

The Perks of Travel: Fuel for Personal and Professional Growth

Another delightful aspect of working in the airline industry is the travel opportunities. Of course, I knew travel would be part of the job, but I underestimated just how enriching it would be – not just professionally, but also personally.

Professionally, travelling has allowed me to experience at first hand the complexities of global operations. Visiting different clients, meeting with international colleagues and understanding the unique challenges faced by airlines in various regions have given me a broader perspective on the industry. It’s one thing to discuss global operations in a conference room, it’s another to be on the ground, seeing how things work in different parts of the world. This hands-on experience has deepened my understanding of the industry and improved my ability to contribute meaningfully to projects and strategies.

On a personal level, the travel opportunities have been equally enriching. Visiting new cities, experiencing different cultures and meeting people from all walks of life have broadened my horizons in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Travel has always been a passion of mine, but working in the airline industry has taken it to another level. It’s not just about ticking destinations off a list, it’s about truly engaging with the world and growing as an individual. The travel perks of working in the airline industry are more than just a benefit – they’re an integral part of the job that fuels both personal and professional development.

Conclusion

Transitioning to the airline industry has been an exhilarating and transformative experience, far beyond what I ever imagined. The industry’s complexity, coupled with the surprising need for creative problem-solving has challenged me in new and exciting ways. The supportive, collaborative environment has made the learning curve manageable, while the opportunity to travel has enriched both my personal and professional life. Ultimately, working in the airline industry is a thrilling adventure — one that continuously pushes me to grow, adapt and embrace the ever-changing landscape of global aviation.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Leila Rešidbegović, Travel in Motion AG

Modularity is a term often used. It is well associated as one of the benefits of moving away from a legacy, monolithic Passenger Service System and towards a componentised ecosystem.

Earlier this year at a conference, unsurprisingly the concept of modularity came up a lot – but there were many different interpretations and assumed benefits. We hope with this blog post to leave you in a better position when it comes to modularity.

First, on definitions.

Modularity itself refers to a system design principle that breaks down a system into smaller, self-contained units or modules. Each module is designed to perform a specific function and can operate independently, but when integrated, they form a cohesive system. In plainer English, it is a stand-alone capability, it is triggered by passing information to it, typically via an API, and it returns a result. For example, a well-known IT vendor has the concept of a “Segmentation” module. It has one job; it will take ingest customer data and context and return the likely segment for the customer. This information can then be used by another module to tailor the offers a customer is given. You can buy a module off-the-shelf and there is no additional requirement to buy any other module to make it useable.

What does modularity look like today?

Some mature airlines already have this concept. They work with the concept of an orchestration layer. It is typically built in-house or by a system integrator. This layer receives requests from channels (e.g., their website, mobile app, call centre, NDC) and sends requests to a module. This provides the airline with full control. For example, it can allow an airline to send a set of offers to a dynamic offers engine for repricing but only do so for its direct channels as that is the channel where it offers dynamic pricing.

Each module can theoretically be swapped out without having to change the overall ecosystem. Airlines can even run multiple vendors for the same module at once. For example, an airline may have two shopping engines and can choose to route requests to Shopping Engine A or B based on certain conditions.

What is the benefit?

There are benefits to modularity from a commercial, technical and organisational prospective.

From a commercial perspective, an airline can procure modules from different vendors, choosing the best solution for each function. This can lead to better strategic options related to pricing and vendor selection and reduces the need to compromise on capabilities. Additionally, procuring many modules rather than one monolithic system can lead to improved negotiation power. Lastly, on the commercial front, an airline can spread their investment over time, adding modules as and when they need them, rather than a substantial upfront investment in a monolithic system.

From a technical angle, there is the opportunity to conduct maintenance more easily and push changes without having to take an entire system offline. There is also the possibility to scale parts of the system. For example, an airline may need to more compute capacity because it has a sale upcoming, it can scale the parts related to offer management, without doing so for other parts of the system.

From an organisational perspective, modules align with modern ways of working. As a company’s technology architecture often mirrors its organisational structure over time, adopting a modular approach allows an airline and its vendors to clearly define areas of responsibility, fostering a modern organisational structure. This modularity ensures capabilities are created once and owned by a single empowered team responsible for uptime and business KPIs. Currently, airlines often use a monolithic, channel-based architecture with different teams managing the same capability. For instance, seat selection by travel agents is managed by an airline’s indirect channel team, the e-commerce team for the website, and the operational team for airport enquiries.

Potholes ahead: What to watch out for as you drive towards modularly.

When designing and procuring a modular ecosystem, there are many elements to watch out for. Here are just three of them:

1. Is it standalone?

If a vendor offers a module that has a pre-requisite for other products, then it is not standalone. Be cautious of this especially when expanding with an existing vendor and ensure any new modules you are purchasing could work without existing products. You may well decide to change those in the future.

2. Understand the true cost of purchasing an orchestration layer.

If you are procuring an orchestration layer, then ensure you understand the cost of integrating other vendors into the ecosystem. Will the vendor charge a substantial amount to integrate a competitor’s product vs. their own? If the cost feels too high relative to the work required, consider whether this is to artificially better position their own product. It’s not an open and fair ecosystem if that is the case and this will prevent you from obtaining the best product.

3. Bear in mind overall complexity.

It may be tempting to shop for the best vendor for each module. Whilst at Travel in Motion, we do believe in a best of breed environment being suitable for some airlines, they must have the procurement and technology maturity to get the benefits a best of breed environment has on offer. Taking on board too many vendors, at this early stage of industry maturity, may leave you with headaches to run your ecosystem.

How can the whole airline industry achieve modularity?

To achieve modularity, an airline needs the capability to have control over its channels and orchestration layer. Not every airline will develop this, nor will they have the ability to instruct and monitor a system integrator. Airline-industry focused vendors have responded. They are developing channels and orchestration layers “as a service”. All major vendors are also now offering the ability to integrate other vendor modules, typically as a customisation. However, this customisation can be a lot of effort to set up. A vendor’s own modules come readily integrated, and sometimes this can be a benefit to get up and running more quickly but also to only pick up the phone once if it goes wrong.

It’s one thing to build and launch a multi-vendor ecosystem. It is another to operate it. Airlines, as risk averse beings, may be tempted to stick with a single vendor, based on promises of reduced risk and increased ease. Doing so would put aside the benefits a best of breed multi-vendor environment offers. Instead, airlines ensure that you are mitigating the risk in order to take those benefits. Airlines wanting to approach this environment must consider how it will:

• Run the ecosystem and rectify issues across a multi-vendor technology stack. For example, how will you ensure all vendors are cohesively working together, rather than blaming each other.
• Coordinate improvement to its capabilities, acknowledging it will need to do so across multiple vendors.
• Stay active in evaluating the market’s capabilities now that it has the options to swap out modules.

So, what next?

We recommend that airlines whose PSS or related systems contracts end in the next few years consider the options you have for the next generation of systems you will require, and which will meet your future needs. Consider how you can benefit from modularity, or where you see challenges in a multi-vendor environment.

If you are unsure, rely on the experience of companies such as Travel in Motion. We stand ready to help you evaluate your strategy in keeping competitive by moving towards a modern retailing environment. We have already helped several airlines to craft their ideal technology state based on its starting point, and its desired business ambitions. We have equipped such airlines with detailed transition plans, and some have already started implementation.

Jason Balluck, Travel in Motion AG

New Distribution Capability (NDC) has been around for a while. We have written many blogs, whitepapers, and other articles on the topic over the past years. However even today, airlines are challenged with certain aspects of the implementation and adoption. In our view, airlines fall into one of the following five categories:

1. All-in – These airlines have implemented NDC with a holistic distribution strategy. They had (or still have) an approach which drove volumes because they either had clear incentivisation for NDC, or disincentivised the GDS EDIFACT channel. However, they did this in a planned manner and could successfully grow their NDC adoption to 30%, 50% or even more of indirect distribution. This NDC volume shift could be with or without GDS NDC distribution depending on the airline. Based on public information, we would include airlines such as the Lufthansa Group and Copa in this category.
2. Getting there – These airlines implemented NDC with a good intent, however either not with the right strategy, potentially lacking incentive, and capabilities (e.g., lack of servicing capability) without the right internal “drive”, or with the wrong timing. Their NDC adoption is mediocre, and many of these airlines are now looking for a boost by implementing NDC via the GDS – many times with a suboptimal commercial or content model.
3. What went wrong? – This category represents airlines which implemented NDC without a solid plan. Often, this was looked at as a technology project, or “just something we need to do”. However, it was not tied to an overall distribution and channel strategy, nor was it widely supported throughout the organization. Some of these airlines have had NDC for 5 years or more and are still in the low single-digit percentages of channel shift.
4. Just starting – There are many airlines just starting with NDC. Recent announcements include Turkish Airlines, Korean Airlines and Delta Air Lines. They have the chance to do things right by benefitting from the learnings and mistakes others made (if they are willing to). The models and processes are better known, the NDC APIs are more mature, and it should be clear to the airlines what the agency community likes and dislikes. In theory, these airlines have a great chance of “getting it right”.
5. Oh that… – Yes, there are still airlines who are not yet invested or even thinking about NDC. And that is ok. These airlines have other priorities right now. They will adopt NDC naturally in many cases once it is the more common technology at the GDS – which, by the way, none of the GDSs dispute will be the case over time.

From doing many NDC audits for airlines of all sizes and regions, we have learned that airlines do the following things very right, or wrong – wrong also meaning perhaps not at all due to the lack of realisation of the importance, lack of time, lack of resources or other reasons.

1. Distribution strategy – A solid, future-proof distribution strategy is of the essence. This must consider the direct and indirect channels, GDS contracts and the overall system and solution landscape. Optimally, they will define a path towards their optimal target state of distribution, identify hurdles and risks and clearly understand the distribution model and its cost implications. We have worked with many airlines creating these strategies, and one of the main challenges we often see is that the airline distribution team only does this type of work every few years and negotiates with GDS and PSS vendors even less. Thus, the understanding of the airline’s distribution contracts is challenging. Even for us, doing this on a daily basis, it is often complex to understand the intricacies of these contracts and recognise the consequences of certain decisions made during the strategy phase.
2. Plan the growth – Create a target list by market, and optimally, follow the TAM/SAM/SOM methodology to correctly identify and qualify the potential sellers and seller types by market. Clearly assess your current (or planned) NDC solution to ensure it meets the functional capabilities as required / requested by the sellers. Educate the sales team and other parts of the organisation to ensure there is a good understanding of NDC basics, but also more complex topics such as incentivisation, connection methods, available content, etc. Equip the sales and account teams with confidence and with the information they need to go to the trade. Identify and work with the right aggregators to support the growth.
3. Prepare for adoption – This step includes more training, defining internal and external processes (and optimising them), monitoring and measuring the traffic and volumes, and managing communication. Let’s take that apart a bit more. Before we do, we’d like to suggest that airlines create what we refer to as an NDC Adoption Playbook. A document which is accessible to anyone in the airline implementing NDC. This should include the documentation to the topics outlined below and updated constantly to be the single go-to reference for airline employees. This should be developed and maintained by the NDC core team with support from sales, the product team(s), operational support, and technology.
   • Training – Helpdesk and support – both technical and business support – require training to understand new and changed processes. A travel agent may call with a problem but not know if this is a technical issue or a functional issue. This must be identified and then handled accordingly.
   • Processes – Define the actual support process and flow – where and how is the problem ticket managed, who communicates to whom, and how. Or the implementation processes – the more standardised these are, the more efficient the implementations will be. There are other processes which are key and must be defined, documented, and understood across the affected parts of the organisation. Furthermore, taking the time to optimise these processes allows for more efficient scaling.
   • Monitoring and measuring traffic and volumes – Ensure that the operations team knows what is going on from a technical perspective. Are we responding fast enough to the queries, are there an unusual amount of error responses, is the system being swamped with “useless” requests. On the functional side, how are the sales volumes and values, are we reaching our targets, is there an increase in wallet share, a shift of channel or an increase in sales – or whatever the defined KPIs are. This is also how you can evaluate the efficiency and adoption rate of new products, or new decisions taken in your distribution strategy.
   • Communication – Both internal and external communication are, in our experience, often not done well or the importance of it underestimated. We urge airlines to develop a communications plan to keep the trade informed of changes, new functionality, and operational issues.
     
     

What is my next step?

If you have identified yourself with one of the airline types above, you may be thinking “what should I do next?”. The answer, as is often the case, is “it depends”. However, we would recommend you do a quick step-check. Do you have “1. Distribution Strategy” covered and understood perfectly, and a path towards the distribution model which suits you? If not, start by defining it, as without this, your efforts to grow NDC may be futile. Then, step 2: do you have your plan for growth? Does it paint a clear picture of the actions you need to take and the KPIs which define success? If not, you should take this as the focus for your next discussions. If that plan is clear, then take a stab at step 3 and create your NDC Adoption Playbook. We have developed several of these with airlines, and the value of this single NDC data and process repository is not to be underestimated.

If you feel prepared and have completed the steps above, then there should be nothing in the way of success and growth.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG

[i] TAM = Total Addressable Market / SAM = Sales Addressable Market / SOM = Sales Obtainable Market

Panta Rhei, this is the name of the biggest excursion boat on lake Zurich. Sometimes, when we are in one of our shared workspaces downtown, we catch a view of this wonderful ship and think about the ship’s name: Panta Rhei, which means (according to Wikipedia, as none of our team members had ancient Greek at school): everything flows.

Panta Rhei also describes the status that parts of our industry are currently in: Airline distribution has started the next big evolutionary step. IT systems that have served the industry for decades are being replaced by modern technology that enables airline commercial operations to be focused on customer experience. Through this shift, airlines will be able to become retailers, replacing their legacy, trip-based system environments with modern offer and order management-based platforms. Under the stewardship of IATA, a lot of work on designing and defining the new world of commercial airline processes and airline IT has already been done. If we use the overall process of passenger, or rather customer experience from offer to order to delivery, we can also see that much more work has already been done on defining the “offer” and “order” parts compared to delivery. Delivery – some call it Service Delivery, others order delivery – covers the process and work that needs to be executed to deliver the services which were presented as offers and later ordered by the customer. In our airline industry, delivery mainly takes place in the airport environment. Numerous players, airlines, airports, ground handlers, security, customs, immigration, retail, etc. are stakeholders in an airport, leading to a great deal of complexity. Therefore, defining Service Delivery in the context of offer and order management is not an easy undertaking. At the same, time airports and their ecosystems need guidance from the airlines concerning the customer experience, otherwise the finger pointing between all parties may start (or in some cases continue) about why some strategic investment decisions have not been taken.

From an IT perspective, the Departure Control System (DCS) has traditionally played a pivotal role when it comes to passenger handling. As part of Service Delivery, the traditional check-in process becomes more of a back-office process, with the traditional boarding pass being replaced by a new format constantly synchronized with the actual order. This process is also designed to be supported by biometrics in the future. All information for serving and delivering to the customer is available in real-time to all involved parties at all touchpoints. The customer is consistently and continuously informed via mobile applications and the ground handler, or other airline airport staff have access to the order data with new and user-friendly front ends. This leads to a fundamental transformation of the legacy DCS to either operations management for aircraft handling and delivery orchestration or management of customer handling. For customer handling, the order remains constantly updated as a “single source of truth” and is integrated into all relevant airport processes, such as baggage management, waitlists, overbookings, etc. The order also feeds relevant parts of the airport and aircraft turnaround operations, such as fuelling or weight and balance operations. In addition, the customer shall receive relevant and personalized offers at touchpoints during the airport experience. Therefore, the future airport systems for customer handling must also be connected with the airline’s offer management system.

The (at least partial) substitution of DCS through Offer and Order Management systems (OOMS) leads to a call for action to DCS vendors. From a high-level technical perspective, vendors need to support passenger handling not only for order-based Service Delivery but also by providing the capability to offer relevant services to the customer at touchpoints at an airport. Overall, their future role can be summarized as the providers of the system that steers the passenger’s airline experience, by orchestrating and supporting the customer journey at the airport through interfacing into the relevant environment, especially the airlines OOMS and the relevant airport systems.

This requires an overall re-think of the vendor’s systems, integrations and capabilities:

• The (ONE) Order message suite needs to be fully supported.
• The system must be capable of working without legacy data formats such as PNL, ADL, PNR, e-tickets or EMDs, as they will no longer exist.
• At the same time, the system needs to provide the ability to still access the aforementioned legacy components and artefacts, as airlines may partner with other airlines whose operations are still in a legacy environment.
• In addition, an integration into the airline Offer Management System must be available to address retailing and ancillary opportunities at all customer touchpoints during the airport process, regardless of channel, such as a mobile app or airport service desk.

However, the roadmap for DCS might very well be an evolutionary one in which legacy DCS evolves over time to a Service Delivery system. With Order Delivery being at an early stage, DCS vendors have an opportunity to play a role in the new set up.

The legacy Passenger Service System (PSS) providers already have DCS in operations. With the evolution of their portfolio to cover OOMS capabilities, it can be assumed that they will also further evolve their current DCS to service delivery to meet the requirements of the future customer airport experience.

The market players that are not providing legacy PSS functionality have always been dependent on an underlying third-party PSS supporting their customer airlines’ operations. Thus, these vendors do not have a DCS and would have a significant gap to close if they were to develop all the required Service Delivery functionality. This product roadmap challenge is currently being addressed by numerous vendors separately. They have started looking at the market to evaluate potential partnership opportunities, either on an individual deal basis or as a strategic partnership.

Therefore, this offers a business opportunity for legacy DCS providers that are willing to evolve and become Service Delivery providers. Due to the overall modular design of OOMS in general, supported by defined APIs and business processes the system landscape is open enough to seamlessly integrate multi-vendor solutions. This modularity leads to new opportunities for Service Delivery vendors, as airlines are likely to be open to using a Service Delivery system from a vendor other than the one providing their OOMS, overcoming the usual monolithic design of legacy PSS.

This shows that the evolution within our industry offers opportunities for well-established providers, including DCS vendors. Embracing the change and being a front runner for Service Delivery may open new markets to be explored. We all know that the change needs to happen, as consumers expect airlines to digitally serve them as other industries have already been doing for quite some time: customer centric with relevant and personalized offerings at all customer touchpoints and the ability to deliver.

However, the Service Delivery part of the overall industry transformation will not be completely smooth and seamless. Hurdles will pop up that no one had on a risk sheet, timelines might be extended, but this is not unusual. When the MS Panta Rhei made her maiden voyage on Lake Zurich in 2007, the ship was floating in unfavourable positions and produced unusually heavy waves during the journey. As a result of this, some adjustments had to be made to the vessel to reduce the impact on other users of the lake. No one talks about these teething troubles any longer, as the ship is fully in service and the pride of the Lake Zurich fleet. We take this as a good omen for the transition in our industry.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

And it happened again! I was constructing a complex flight itinerary online, reflecting the preferences of my wife and our three adult children. I managed to create the perfect combination of segments at a good price. Only one final step was still pending: payment. I entered my credit card details and … an authentication through the app on my mobile phone was required. But where was my mobile phone? Not at my desk, not in my office – so I tried to call it from my landline, but remembered at the same that I muted it. Therefore, I ran two floors downstairs to the living room, still could not find the damn thing, but saw my Apple watch. I pinged my mobile phone, after shouting out to everyone to be silent for a moment and finally found it on the terrace. I accepted the payment on my phone (pretending not to hear my wife asking me to help in the garden), went back upstairs to my office only to see that the session of my favourite flight portal had already ended. No payment, no conversion and not a good customer experience, but a very secure (unfortunately unfinished) payment process.

I am sure that I am not the only one who has experienced this. We all understand that there is a big need for an airline, as with all other online retailers, to execute payment securely as the number of fraud attempts (e.g., using stolen credit card data) has continuously risen over the decades. Increasing security by enforcing regulations such as PSD2 (Payment Service Directive) and 3D Secure are de-risking payments but are also creating complexity and may even negatively impact conversion, as customer experience suffers.

At the same time, payments are increasingly becoming a significant cost factor for an airline. Numerous studies assume that payment costs represent up to 3% of airline revenues, which is very close to the annual profit our industry is usually achieving on average. McKinsey summarizes that annual payment costs for airlines have already hit the $20 billion barrier.[1]

What does this mean for an airline that is working on a payment strategy? In essence, an airline needs to optimize three strategic components: conversion, fraud prevention and cost efficiency. But these targets are conflicting. Conversion can be increased by the provision of easy and straightforward payment processes. However, this approach may compromise on security. Indeed, in my illustrative, but “based on a true story” example, I have not converted as a client, because I wasn’t able to meet the security requirements of the payment process. In this case, security took precedence over conversion – and I think for a good reason.

Let us take another example: supporting local payment methods is becoming increasingly a necessity for airline retailing. In Switzerland, “Twint” is one of the most used alternative payment methods (APM). Many local retailers support it, as it is secure, provides a good customer experience and Twint claims to lead to increased conversion rates. But APMs are known to be costly for retailers, especially if they need to support different APMs in different markets.

We do not need a lot of imagination to identify and describe other combinations where increasing conversion, reducing fraud and reducing cost are conflicting targets. Our payment “guru” Urs Kipfer summarizes this dilemma in a triangle.

It is obvious, that an airline’s payment strategy must follow a holistic view, which defines the strategic target that should be achieved, and thus also takes into account the need to compromise on the other targets. As airline organizations traditionally have the tendency to be complex, it is essential to include all internal stakeholders – especially as the affected business units may have conflicting interests among themselves.

A strategic approach that clearly defines the targets to be achieved, includes internal stake holders and is driven with the airline’s senior management endorsement is essential for success. It is worthwhile to choose to follow this path. McKinsey estimates that our industry is not addressing an annual $14 billion in potential revenues and savings. Missing revenue opportunities during the payment process itself, too complex payment methods and unaddressed cost reductions all contribute. It is now time to strategically address the payment potential for every airline!

In the end I finally booked our flights – but used a different portal, as my initial itinerary wasn’t available any longer. But I still had to run down two floors afterwards, again – this time to help in the garden, but this is another story.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

Meet the team: Do you want to further discuss this topic or are you interested in an exchange about how airline distribution is changing? Meet us at the Aviation Festival Americas on 15 and 16 May 2024 in Miami, USA. You can register here and by entering the discount code INMOTION40 you will get a 40% discount on the admission fee.

—

[1] McKinsey Sep. 2022 – Airline retailing: How payment innovation can improve the bottom line. (https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel-logistics-and-infrastructure/our-insights/airline-retailing-how-payment-innovation-can-improve-the-bottom-line)

Personal interaction with our industry partners is key to how we work. This May will give us good opportunities to meet, discuss and catch up.

Daniel Friedli and Thibaud Rohmer will be at the Aviation Festival Americas in Miami on 15 and 16 May. Daniel will moderate the retail and payment track on the first day of the event. On the second day he will be on a fireside chat about airlines’ shift to retailing with Marc Rosenberg, the chair of the programme committee.  Register now through this link for the Aviation Festival Americas and receive a discount of 40% quoting the discount code “INMOTION40”.

We will also be present at PROS Outperform from 20 till 22 May in Orlando, FL. Daniel Friedli will be on a fireside chat on 21 May discussing IT and tech implications of the shift to offer and order. If you are interested in attending, please register here.

Our engagement with IATA is key for our work and therefore Mona Kristensen and Jason Balluck will be representing Travel in Motion at the IATA Offers and Orders Forum in Geneva on 21 and 22 May.

Urs Kipfer will represent Travel in Motion and Oystin at the ATPS 2024 Airline and Travel Payment Summit in London (on 22 and 23 May), further focussing on our engagements in the airline payment sphere. If you are interested in attending, please register here.

Jason Balluck will be one of the chair persons of the Digital Travel Connect conference on May 23 and 24 in St. Albans, London, UK. He will run the sessions on day 2 of this international conference and moderate several panels with high profile representatives of Accor, Iberostar, TAP Air Portugal, Virgin Atlantic, Club Med, Edelweiss Air, easyJet and Melia Hotels. If you are interested in attending, please register here.

Boris Padovan will host the IT track “Technologies that are Shaping the Future” of the Southeast Europe Aviation Network on 29 May in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This conference focusses on the booming aviation region of South East Europe and Eurasia and is attended by numerous airlines, airports and other aviation affiliated companies. If you are interested in attending please register here.

1. Simple question. Multi-faceted answer.

At Travel in Motion, we support airlines in defining their distribution strategy and the execution thereof, creating NDC adoption strategies, evaluating their NDC readiness, and other related topics. During these activities, one important question is bound to come at some point: “How do we ensure that we made the right choice?”

In other terms, how can an airline evaluate the success of its distribution strategy? While the question is very straightforward, the answer, interestingly, is not.

2. Defining your goals, monitoring your success

First, it is important to identify the goal of said distribution strategy. While most airlines tend to agree that the end goal is optimising distribution cost versus revenue opportunities, airlines will have different focal points to do so. Many airlines are currently focusing on shifting distribution from EDIFACT to NDC, enabling them to better support of Offer and Order processes and technologies: However, each airline has a different path to that end goal or even different visions of what those entails.

Some are going on that journey with the intent of reducing distribution costs, others focus on the customer experience with targeted offers or better servicing, and yet others aim to increase revenues with dynamic pricing and other new capabilities.

Furthermore, with airlines gaining more control over their distribution, new KPIs have started to appear, allowing them to monitor with more precision the efficiency of their strategic choices.

In the rest of this post, we look at some of the industry’s KPIs – old and new. Please note that we are focusing on distribution performance, so, while security, on-time performance, and other metrics are very relevant for airlines, they are not this post’s focus.

3. The Big Five

For a long time, the airline industry has mainly been using five categories of KPIs for distribution which can each be then evaluated per channel and as a global airline performance view.

1. Sales and Revenue

The main measure of a successful distribution strategy is its impact on sales and revenue. By analyzing sales data, airlines can understand customer preferences, optimize pricing strategies, and tailor their offerings to meet market demand. Revenue analysis, on the other hand, helps assess the profitability of different routes, flights, and services, enabling strategic decisions about resource allocation. Together, these metrics offer a comprehensive view of the airline’s retail performance, guiding the refinement of its distribution strategy for enhanced customer satisfaction and profitability.

This includes not just ticket sales, but also ancillary revenue from add-ons like seat upgrades, extra baggage, and in-flight meals. These ancillary revenues should be tracked as a percentage of total revenue, by market, customer segment, route and other metrics, allowing airlines to identify opportunities for diversification.

2. Cost Efficiency

The other side of the coin in evaluating the success of a strategy is to look at the evolution of distribution costs. Each channel has its own associated costs, and with airlines starting to shift their distribution to different channels, it is crucial to monitor the impacts of that shift. Furthermore, while NDC comes with new capabilities, the first steps for an airline with NDC may come with a lesser servicing capability than its other channels, resulting in an increase of customer care costs (and, as we will see later, a decrease in customer satisfaction). Then, by increasing self-servicing capabilities, these costs will start decreasing. Also, as indicated earlier, some airlines become airline retailers with the aim of reducing their distribution costs: for such airlines, this metric is paramount. Further, a shift in channels and distribution model may increase costs for some channels. While this is typically a calculated risk, and offset by channel shift or other means, this must be carefully monitored to ensure the cost increase remains within the bounds as set by the strategy, and the cost offset is successful.

3. Reach

Reach refers to the number of potential customers that an airline can connect with through its various distribution channels, such as direct sales on its website, indirect sales through travel agencies, or digital platforms. Reach is often related to market distribution but can also nowadays refer to customer segmentation or agency type.  The higher reach an airline has, the more customers it can target. However, as we will see in “conversion”, reach is just the first piece of the puzzle. Converting these potential customers to actual customers is the second. Measuring reach also allows the airline to create products and offer content which is better suited to the various channels, markets buyers and travelers. This, in turn, should increase conversion as well as revenue.

4. Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures the quantity of search requests that result in a booking. A high conversion rate indicates that the airline’s offering is well suited to the target markets and segments – or at least, the offering is more attractive than the competition. By evaluating conversion rate, and combining it with markets and segmentation, an airline can tailor its offering to ensure higher conversion, resulting in higher revenues. Most airlines evaluate conversion rates primarily for airfare sales, but a new trend sees airlines starting to monitor ancillary conversion rates as well.

5. Customer Satisfaction

Lastly, in the era of modern airline retailing, customer satisfaction is paramount. NDC enables airlines to offer a more personalized and seamless booking experience, which can significantly enhance customer satisfaction. High levels of customer satisfaction indicate that the airline’s distribution strategy and product offering is effective, with products and services being successfully and seamlessly delivered to the customer. Conversely, low satisfaction levels may signal issues, such as inefficiencies in the processes or a mismatch between the airline’s offerings and customer needs. As indicated earlier, during its first step in this new world, an airline may have limited servicing capabilities in its new channels, resulting in a higher need for the airline’s customer care agents to intervene.

4. The new KPIs on the block

1. ARM Index score

Becoming a full retailer is a journey, and a long one at that. IATA provides the Airline Retailing Maturity Index, which is a way for airlines to evaluate how advanced they are on that path. By regularly self-evaluating through that score, and tracking the evolution of its ARM index score, an airline can get a good estimate on how far along they are in their retailing maturity. And while these are not directly cost and revenue related, it is safe to assume that a higher maturity can generate more revenue and potentially lead to lower cost of servicing.

2. Channel contribution

Channel contribution refers to the percentage of total sales that each distribution channel contributes. If a particular channel has a high contribution, it indicates that the airline’s offerings and marketing strategies are resonating well with customers on that platform. With airlines aiming to see a shift in their distribution, from GDS towards digital direct and NDC (or other direct-connects), monitoring channel contribution is the best way to evaluate this shift. Similarly to previous metrics, this KPI can be evaluated through several factors such as the channel contribution for a specific market, customer type, or even agency type when focusing on indirect distribution.

3. Sustainability

Either due to regulations, customer motivation, or company policy: sustainability is a serious consideration. Travel in Motion recently published a number of posts on the topic on this very same site (go read it, it’s good!). Sustainability involves assessing factors such as the carbon footprint of flights, the use of renewable energy in operations, the implementation of waste reduction strategies in onboard services and many other aspects. A successful distribution strategy should align with the airline’s sustainability goals, promoting eco-friendly options and communicating the airline’s green initiatives to customers. Furthermore, by doing so, airlines can attract environmentally conscious customers, enhance their brand image, and ensure their operations are future-proof against increasing environmental regulations.

5. Conclusion and call to action

Deciding which KPIs to use in order to evaluate your strategy is quite complex. However, with airlines gaining control of their entire distribution, with more visibility, it is now possible for them to have a holistic approach to evaluating their success. Thus, once the airline has defined the key metrics, it must also evaluate where the data for these measurements is best gathered from, where they should be stored and how these can be visualized. Further, it is key to present the relevant KPIs at the right levels and to the right audiences, ensuring that there is no information overflow which will result in the data being ignored.

It is now up to each airline to define their goal, decide on a strategy to target them and pick the relevant KPIs to evaluate this strategy. Travel in Motion helps airlines in many ways, and part of designing a new distribution strategy is how to properly evaluate it. By setting proper goals and monitoring every step of the way towards these goals, we support airlines in moving forward in the right direction. There is no one path to modern airline retailing, but rather many interesting journeys.

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

Meet the author: Do you want to further discuss this topic or are you interested in an exchange about how airline distribution is changing? Meet Thibaud Rohmer, as well as our Partner and Managing Director Daniel Friedli at the Aviation Festival Americas on 15 and 16 May 2024 in Miami, USA. You can register here and by entering the discount code INMOTION40 you will get a 40% discount on the admission fee.

In the fast-evolving landscape of the airline industry, the adoption of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles is increasingly becoming a pivotal factor in shaping the strategies of airlines. In this blog I explore how airlines are integrating ESG to contribute to a more sustainable and responsible future for air travel – not only by compensation or using sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

ESG in airline distribution, for example, starts with a focus on reducing the environmental impact of distribution processes. From paperless ticketing to digital boarding passes, airlines are leveraging technology to minimize the use of paper, thereby decreasing their ecological footprint. This move aligns with broader sustainability goals and reduces the demand for natural resources, contributing to a more environmentally-friendly distribution system.

Furthermore, airlines are exploring ways to optimize their logistics networks to reduce fuel consumption and emissions associated with the transportation of goods and cargo. By adopting eco-friendly packaging and optimizing delivery routes, airlines can make significant strides in reducing their overall carbon footprint.

The social pillar of ESG in airline distribution revolves around ensuring fair and inclusive practices that benefit both employees and consumers. One key aspect is enhancing accessibility. Airlines are increasingly investing in user-friendly digital platforms and mobile applications, making it easier for passengers to access information, book flights, and manage their travel itineraries. This not only enhances the overall customer experience but also promotes inclusivity by catering to a diverse range of travellers.

Moreover, airlines are extending their commitment to social responsibility to their distribution partners. Collaborating with travel agencies and third-party distributors that share similar ESG values is becoming a priority. This involves ensuring fair business practices, respecting workers’ rights and fostering partnerships with organizations that uphold ethical standards in their operations.

Governance in airline distribution capabilities involves adopting ethical practices, ensuring compliance with regulations, and maintaining transparency in dealings. The integration of ESG principles requires airlines to carefully evaluate their business partners, ensuring that they adhere to ethical business practices and contribute positively to society.

Airlines are increasingly focusing on data security and privacy as part of their governance strategies in distribution. Protecting customer information and ensuring secure transactions are critical in building trust with passengers. By prioritizing these aspects, airlines can demonstrate their commitment to responsible governance and ethical conduct in their business processes.

Implementing ESG principles in airline distribution capabilities is not without its challenges. One major hurdle is the need for technological investments to overhaul existing systems and processes. The transition to digital platforms and the adoption of sustainable logistics solutions may require significant upfront investments. However, these challenges present opportunities for innovation and differentiation.

Airlines that successfully integrate ESG principles into their distribution capabilities can gain a competitive edge. Beyond meeting regulatory requirements, they can appeal to an increasingly conscious consumer base that values sustainability and ethical business practices. By addressing these challenges head on, airlines can position themselves as leaders in responsible and sustainable distribution.

As the airline industry continues to undergo profound transformations, the integration of ESG principles into airline process, practices and capabilities emerges as a key driver of change. From environmental considerations like paperless initiatives to social responsibilities in promoting inclusivity, and governance in ethical practices, the adoption of ESG principles is reshaping the way airlines distribute their services.

The challenges posed by this shift are opportunities for airlines to innovate and demonstrate their commitment to a sustainable future. As passengers become more discerning in their choices, airlines that prioritize ESG in the way they think and act are not only meeting regulatory requirements but are also contributing to a more responsible and resilient aviation industry. In the journey towards a greener, more inclusive future, ESG in the airline world is steering the industry towards new horizons.

At TiM, we are unwavering in our dedication to maintaining a carbon-neutral footprint across every aspect of our operation, from travel and home office practices to digital engagement. We believe that every action counts, which is why every member of our team actively participates in reporting their individual home office footprints, striving to minimize emissions wherever possible.
But we don’t stop there. TiM takes proactive measures to offset all carbon emissions we generate, ensuring a substantial reduction in our environmental impact. Our meticulous approach to calculating carbon emissions, using the trusted MyClimate.org platform, ensures transparency and accountability in our efforts.
By investing in impactful global projects through MyClimate, we’re not just reducing our footprint – we’re actively contributing to a more sustainable future for all. At TiM, environmental responsibility isn’t just a duty – it’s our passion and commitment to creating positive change.

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.

Mona Kristensen, Travel in Motion

In the past, buying travel seemed to be simpler, especially as payment principles have grown more intricate over the last decade. Sales structures for tickets were refreshingly clear. Tickets were sold in ticket offices or by travel agents. Fares were only organised by booking class. Back then, no one thought of charging separately for gourmet delicacies, cappuccinos or some extra legroom. Payment was pretty much exclusively by credit card or cash. Card numbers were noted down carelessly, stored in poorly protected revenue accounting systems and transmitted directly to the acquirers for billing. The acquirers were still really concerned about the airline customers. Although the fees were outrageously high, authorization and billing involved little technical or administrative effort. Last but not least, governments and card organizations were still reluctant to issue regulations and guidelines with regards to payment processes.

The big game changer in ticket sales came in the form of the internet. Initially, they viewed web sales simply as an additional sales channel. The great opportunities for making offers more flexible and optimizing revenue through additional sales were not exploited by most airlines. However, online fraudsters quickly became aware of the potential of the online ticket sale. At the beginning of the 2000s, fraud cases (and the associated chargebacks) skyrocketed. This in turn triggered a flood of creative fraud prevention solutions. The Card Schemes essentially came up with two major initiatives to curb card fraud: 3-D Secure and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). The implementation of the resulting standards and technologies was (and still is) a huge challenge for airlines stuck in legacy processes.

From PCI and 3-D Secure to PSP

These new standards and requirements have led to greater complexity in payment processing. PCI DSS regulates the processing and storage of credit card data. The associated certification is so strict and extensive that only a few highly specialized service providers are still allowed to process and store card data at all. 3-D Secure refers to the additional authentication of the cardholder. This standard also adds a great deal of complexity to payment processes.

PCI DSS and 3-D Secure have led to the emergence of a new type of service provider: the Payment Service Provider (PSP). The PSP helps merchants (and therefore also airlines) to process payments easily, with all the complexity being outsourced to the PSP.

The airlines now had to integrate additional service providers such as PSPs and fraud screening platforms. Moreover, the cost of developing and maintaining online retail platforms was constantly increasing. Airlines therefore began to pass on the costs of payment processes to their customers – the Optional Payment Charge (OPC) was born.

Of course, reports of online scams motivated law makers to draw up regulations and legislation. The most important of these is the “Payment Service Directive” (PSD), a set of EU regulations which means above all that all payment processes must be protected by “Strong Customer Authentication” (SCA) and that surcharging is no longer permitted.

The reliance on PSP and apparition of POP

To make matters worse, consumers started to expect more from airlines in the 2010s. After having made do with cash and credit cards for decades, they now demanded mobile payment, PayPal and payment by instalments.

In response to the turmoil of regulation, risks, costs and customer requirements, airlines initially adapted their applications and platforms. Services such as PSP, fraud screening and tokenization were implemented by the airlines. This resulted in highly complex networks of interlocking processes and applications that, over time, no one could really keep track of.

In their distress, the airlines turned to the PSPs, who looked at the issue in depth and came to the conclusion that a single PSP would inevitably be overwhelmed by the wealth of issues and regional peculiarities. The solution could only be a new type of service that would act as a new application layer between the airlines’ booking processes and the payment service providers. This was the birth of the Payment Orchestration Platform (POP).

The orchestra for payments

But which issues should a POP address, tackle and optimize? If the challenges, annoyances, threats and wishes from the airlines’ perspective are distilled to the essentials, the core issues that all need to be kept under control are revealed: cost, risk and conversion.  

Costs are controlled via:

• the choice of service providers
• the prioritization of means of payment
• the avoidance of complaints and queries
• the generation of FX profits
• OPC

Risk is managed through:

• secure means of payment
• Fraud screening and fraud management
• PCI conformity

Conversion is promoted with:

• simplicity
• trustworthiness
• local means of payment
• low rejection rates

The core goal of a good POP must be to have a positive impact on cost, risk and conversion. This also generates separate costs, although ideally these are compensated for by optimizing the processes. But what exactly is the role of the POP?

A POP essentially performs three tasks: analysis, payment and reporting.

1. Analysis

Factors such as the customer’s origin, shopping cart (routing), booking class, the desired payment method and the customer’s risk profile are checked using various databases and fraud screening.

2. Payment

The customers are shown the means of payment available in their region, any FX profits are skimmed off via DCC or MCP, an OPC fee is collected and finally the payment is authorized and settled either by the customer themselves or via a third-party PSP.

3. Reporting

A POP should also standardize the remuneration displays of the various payment methods and acquirers and offer them to the airlines for integration with other airline reporting solutions.

This is, of course, a very simplified description of what a POP is and what advantages it can offer to airlines. Ultimately, it is about outsourcing the complexity of modern payment processes to a third-party provider and only having to maintain a single payment gateway API.

In summary, the holy trinity in the payment business, “cost”, “risk” and “conversion” can be balanced through the use of properly-scoped payment orchestration. However, this requires a “payment strategy” instead of an opportunistic approach to solving the increasing payment issues.

Urs Kipfer, Travel in Motion

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

SPENDERS AND PENNY-PINCHERS

While waiting at a bar counter the other day for the round of drinks I had just ordered, one thought occurred to me. There are two types of people in this world: the spenders and the cheapskates (or, a term I absolutely adore, “penny-pinchers”). While reading these lines, I assume you’ll figure out in which category you fit easily: either you are the guy that sits at the table, enjoying some free rounds, or you are the one going to the counter ordering one more round for all.

So, what does this all have to do with airlines?

Airlines love to upsell: ancillaries, upgrades… anything, really. Following the previous paragraph, you may already guess what category of people goes for these upsells. Nowadays, people often travel with others as a group, with each person or couple having their own booking. This means that airlines only target spenders, providing them with upsell options for their own reservations.

What if you could allow a spender to spend money on ancillaries and upgrades for the whole group?

Let us call this concept “dynamic group”. The airline would give the possibility for its customers to indicate that they are travelling together, giving each other the right to upsell their bookings. Everyone in a dynamic group gets to “buy a round”: this could be lounge access for all, priority boarding, meals, WiFi, or even a class upgrade. All these upsells that “penny-pinchers” would never have paid for are now sold to the “spender” in their group.

RE-THINKING ANCILLARIES

Another important aspect of this upselling is for the airline to be able to sell an experience, rather than only the ancillary. For instance, instead of selling seats, airlines would be able to offer a “sit together” ancillary, ensuring that the whole group gets seats in close proximity.

In that same theme, we can imagine “sharing a bottle”, and “play games together”. While these simply mean “buy X glasses of red wine” or “buy WiFi”, they ultimately are presented in a different, more meaningful package.

Note that these “ancillaries with meaning” do not require dynamic groups, and could also be presented to solo travellers. For instance, while I wouldn’t pay specifically to have a window seat, I could be enticed to get a “seat with a view of Mount Fuji”. Optimally, this may be tied to a motivation scheme that ties me to the airline’s frequent flyer programme, for example by offering me miles if the view is then obstructed by bad weather.

ORDERS: THE KEY TO DYNAMIC GROUPS

With Order Management Systems becoming a reality for airlines, the new capabilities associated with orders are interesting. These dynamic groups could easily be implemented, with a simple inclusion in the order structure of the list of other orders, that have the rights of either consultation (read), or even update (write) for that booking.

Filling in those read/write rights would come from various possible customer flows. Either the customer itself indicates it manually, or it could be automated during order creation. Lastly, the travel agency, upon creating several bookings for the group, could indicate those automatically.

Ancillary sales and ticket upgrades are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dynamic groups. These could also improve the customer experience by allowing travellers to get informed of any relevant update on their friend’s bookings. Or even upon involuntary changes, allowing the airline to ensure the group is reseated together or even rebooked together, further increasing customer satisfaction.

Overall, dynamic groups are an innovative feature which would benefit airlines and customers. I would appreciate being able to travel with my friends, with the airline acknowledging that we travel together. And I look forward to being able to buy a round of lounge access. 

Thibaud Rohmer, Travel in Motion AG

It began, like many discussions in our family, during a joint family dinner. One of my sons, then still a teenager, politically very active and vocal (maybe not for the right side, in his father’s opinion!) announced to all of us that he will never fly again – because of global warming and the contribution aviation makes to it. As an experienced father of three I immediately decided not to enter into a discussion, simply because his siblings would take side with him against their parents, so instead I proposed to look at the facts.

The facts are of course that civil aviation does indeed contribute to global warming – what doesn’t? McKinsey, among numerous others, has recently published an article about decarbonizing aviation that provides an excellent introduction to the subject. It is summarized that pre-pandemic about 2.5% of the total global CO₂ emissions were caused by aviation. Therefore, I think it is fair to state that our industry is not the main problem, although we all are fully aware that every ton of CO₂ counts and that the predicted growth of air traffic will further increase the need to act. It is also necessary to mention that recent research work sees that non-CO₂ effects should not be underestimated in this context, but this research work is still in a nascent stage.

As a result of the increasing need to take action, the aviation industry has committed to become net-zero by 2050. Numerous activities need to contribute to achieving this target, such as more efficient fleets on numerous levels, from better operations and individual flight planning to common airspace control, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and carbon offsetting. McKinsey estimates that a fuel efficiency improvement of 39% has been achieved between 2005 and 2019, and McKinsey’s work further quantifies each of the aforementioned activities in relation to a projected global 2030 view.

All that said, in my view two facts need to be highlighted:

• net-zero aviation cannot be achieved immediately, especially as a lot of the described activities take time to be implemented, such as fleet renewals or moving to a Single European Sky (we don’t even have a single European power plug yet, by the way!)
• it will lead to higher ticket prices for the passengers.

Still, we can already act now, mainly by offsetting CO₂ emissions and further pushing for SAF. Many airlines have taken action and offer CO₂ neutral flights. In some cases, CO₂ neutral flights are offered by airlines as a special fare family or product bundle. For instance, the Lufthansa Group offers “green fares” for all intra-European flights, with the fare uplift covering 20% CO₂ reduction through the usage of SAF and 80% of CO₂ reduction by offsetting. This offer is currently not available for intercontinental flights, although this is most likely just a matter of time, either for LHG or others. Indeed, many other airlines also offer CO₂ neutrality as an optional ancillary product available to purchase, very often based purely on CO₂ offsetting.

Both ways of reducing CO₂ (SAF and offsetting) can be integrated and embedded into distribution processes with relative ease. Third-party service providers such as Berlin-based start-up Sqake offer highly sophisticated and automated tools to exactly calculate the amount of CO₂ emitted by travel on a specific route and cabin class, as well as executing the CO₂ neutrality through SAF, climate projects on behalf of the airlines or a mixture of both. Assuming that airlines will not revenue manage the price of CO₂ neutrality, a cost-based price can be provided to the traveller. And even if the airline is not able to provide such seamless methods as special fare brands or ancillary services, travellers can still compensate emissions by offsetting these through stand-alone methods such as those provided by companies or foundations like Switzerland-based myclimate.org.

In essence, reaching CO₂ neutrality when flying is already possible today, either through a service, provided by the airline or by offsetting through independent providers (although not all CO₂ offsetting projects are equal and attention should be paid to where contributions really go!). But reaching CO₂ neutrality comes at a cost, and in the end travellers will have to cover them, either directly or indirectly. And this point is where I see the paradox. While 56% of travellers worry about climate change, less than 3% of them currently travel CO₂-neutral. Or in other words, most travellers recognise the problem and the mechanisms to achieve individual travel that is CO₂-neutral are available, but very few really “walk the walk.” Therefore, blaming (or even financially punishing) airlines for CO₂ emissions is not very helpful as long as travellers are not willing to cover the additional efforts of the airlines in the form of higher ticket prices.

It was again during one of our family dinners where spoke about our travel plans for 2024. After taking trains and ferries for the last couple of vacations, all family members are back to flying – although this is not necessarily a contradiction to the dinner conversation mentioned at the beginning of this blog. It is about flying in a responsible way by also compensating for our leisure travel. Travellers can already help our industry to accelerate the journey to achieving CO₂ neutrality and (if they travel on business) also help their companies reach their ESG targets. More and more companies have committed to reaching ESG targets and CO₂ reduction down to CO₂ neutrality is a key pillar. Thus, we see growing demand for CO₂ neutral flight products and airlines need to find ways to offer and to deliver them. NDC could also act here as an enabler, if all parts of the distribution chain agree to support this.

Of course, CO₂ offset does not equal CO₂ prevention, but every little helps, and it is a big step forward. Travel in Motion has compensated all of our air travel for many years, and when we entered into our strategic partnership with Oystin Advisory our wish that they also start compensating was immediately accepted. We now strive to become a CO₂-neutral company, and soon hope to be able to offset all emissions from heating the home office, hotel stays and public transport to the cups of coffee we drink and meals we take.

Boris Padovan, Travel in Motion AG

This blog was published jointly with Terrapinn.

Airlines are starting to transform towards Offer and Order Management based commercial distribution and retail processes. Thus, many airlines are beginning to look at their commercial technology stack for the future. Shackled by their PSS, these airlines are looking towards Offer and Order as a path to sell and service in an efficient and modern way. Today’s airline commercial organisation is highly process driven. To achieve a successful transition to Offer and Order, airlines must also consider how their organisation will adapt to make the best use of technology.

We at Travel in Motion are addressing this strategic move in our latest whitepaper “Offer and Order – Moving from Concept to Design.” The whitepaper reviews what has been achieved over the past year at industry level, and incorporates our experience from working with IATA and the Modern Airline Retailing consortium on the IT Transition. In a second step we look ahead into the design phase for the transition towards Offer and Order Management. The document explores the impact of the digital transformation on an airline’s organisation, provide key case studies of how leading airlines and technology providers pursue the transformation, and leaves you, the reader, with key steps on how and where you can start.

We want to thank Accelya for sponsoring this whitepaper. This sponsorship enables us to make this paper available to the whole industry.

DOWNLOAD OUR WHITEPAPER NOW!

As someone who made the leap from customer-facing passenger servicing into the complex world of airline Passenger Service System (PSS) IT at the turn of the century, I vividly remember my initiation into this intricate realm. Back then, a six-month comprehensive training program welcomed me, covering every facet of the PSS – from the business dynamics to the IT intricacies. It was a structured journey that armed me with the necessary knowledge and skills to thrive in the airline domain.

Fast forward to today, and the aviation industry faces a new challenge post-COVID-19. While business is picking up, there’s a pressing need to re-employ for talents that moved on. The catch? The industry has evolved, demanding a deep understanding of cutting-edge technology, cloud solutions, and compliance with ever-evolving regulations. All this must seamlessly integrate with existing IT infrastructures and the talents within the organisation during a transitional phase.

The job market, not just in aviation but across industries, often demands the impossible: “10 years of domain knowledge and experience” for newcomers. In the airline sector, where technological advancements are the norm, finding talents who understand the intricacies of this industry can be a daunting task. After all, if they don’t know what’s already in place, how can they ask the right questions to drive innovation?

So, how can we bridge this knowledge gap effectively and fast track the process of introducing new technical talents to the airline domain? Drawing from my own experiences in onboarding newcomers and engaging in conversations with industry peers, I’ve put together a roadmap for success:

1. Comprehensive Orientation Program

Personal Touch: Begin their journey with a warm welcome and a comprehensive orientation program. This should offer an immersive overview of the airline industry, the company’s culture, and the intricate components and processes within the corporation.

2. Mentorship and Shadowing

Learning by Doing: Pair newcomers with seasoned employees who can act as mentors. Shadowing these experienced hands offers invaluable insights into day-to-day operations and allows newcomers to learn not just theoretically but by example.

3. Online Learning Modules

Self-Paced Learning: Leverage online courses or modules created by industry experts. Cover essential airline industry topics, including jargon and terminology and use these also to upskill talents in the organisation when changes are on the horizon. Allow them to think about what impact the evolution has on their area within the organisation.

4. Continuous Evaluation and Feedback

Personal Growth: Implement regular assessments to track progress. Provide constructive feedback and additional training as needed, fostering personal growth and development.

5. Cultural Immersion

Harmonious Interactions: Given the industry’s diversity, incorporate cultural sensitivity training to promote understanding and harmonious interactions among employees and passengers. Share personal experiences of working with diverse teams.

6. Emergency Response Drills

Safety First: Given the industry’s critical nature, emergency response drills are essential. Train newcomers on how to handle various emergency scenarios like outages or security threats, underscoring the importance of safety.

7. Cross-Training Opportunities

Versatility: Encourage cross-training among employees. This enables newcomers to gain a broader understanding of the airline industry, making them versatile and ready to adapt to different roles if necessary.

8. Customised Training Plans

Tailored Development: Recognise individual strengths and weaknesses. Tailor training plans to individual needs, nurturing personalised development journeys.

9. Regulatory Compliance

Safety and Quality: Ensure all training programs adhere to industry regulations and safety standards, emphasising the industry’s commitment to safety and quality.

In a rapidly evolving industry, training newcomers swiftly is a formidable challenge. However, by adopting a comprehensive training program encompassing orientation, mentorship, online learning, and continuous evaluation, airlines and IT vendors can equip new talents with the skills and knowledge needed to excel. This benefits not only the newcomers but the entire industry, ensuring growth and success.

By sharing my own experiences and insights, I hope to inspire a more efficient and personalised approach to onboarding in the airline domain, where personal growth and industry knowledge go hand in hand.

If you want to know more about how Travel in Motion supports the UN ESG goal number 4, quality education, reach out to us at 

Mona Kristensen, Travel in Motion AG

This blog was published jointly with Terrapinn.

Within the airline IT and commercial departments, everyone is talking about the Order Transformation, or the airline’s digital transformation in more general terms. Ignoring this completely will put an airline into a position of vulnerability in the next few years – vulnerable to the competition which has moved forward, and vulnerable to your PSS (Passenger Service System) provider which might dictate your pace of change.

There are several elements to consider in the case for change – future state architecture, functional benefits, how to transition and many other aspects. However, none of the elements are quite as daunting as trying to build the business case.

Luckily, airlines do not need to start from scratch. Some work has been done over the years which can be used as a reference or starting point. These are mainly the McKinsey study from 2019 and the more recent business case created by IATA (International Air Transport Association) with the Modern Airline Retailing Consortium specifically for the Order Transformation. Of course, many airlines will have their own experience with similar business cases due to investments in NDC (New Distribution Capability), enhanced eCommerce and similar digitally transformative projects.

There are several factors to consider when working through the business case for the Offer and Order Transformation.

1. The starting point and approximate target state: without knowing this, or at least having an idea of what the target state may be, it will be difficult to identify costs and benefits. And, while we may not know with which solution providers we may be working, or which new ancillaries or better services we may be able to offer in three, five or ten years, having an idea of the direction is essential.
2. What the revenue drivers are likely to be: this will often be linked more to the offer transition than the order component, however several airlines have already found that they cannot realise their offer vision without solving the “order” challenge as well. Moving to dynamic pricing may be possible with enhancing the offer and not the order, however will you be able to exploit all the benefits? Or do you calculate factors such as a potential increase of conversion of sales due to the better offers or improved customer servicing you can enable through order? There are many potential revenue drivers, however many of these are often based on various prerequisites – some of these not being technical but rather contractual.
3. The cost savings: this element ranges from potential distribution cost savings to process enhancements which simplify the business to, potentially, having the ability to remove certain solution components altogether. Often, the challenge on the cost saving element in such a large transformation programme is that the business case is made for a three or five-year period. However, with the offer and order transformation, many of the benefits will only be achieved towards the latter part of the transformation, thus only having a positive contribution once the transformation is complete. Thus, we recommend creating a post transformation calculation as well, which should help show if the cost of the transformation will render financial benefits during or only after the project, and which savings (and revenue) can be expected after completion. The removal of software and solutions is an important one. There are considerable opportunities to modernise the system landscape and interfaces well beyond just the offer and order management solution, as the processes are undergoing considerable change. Thus, a solid sketch of the future potential solution and business processes will certainly help understand which solutions are needed in the future and where savings can be achieved.
4. The less obvious and substantiable factors: can factors such as customer satisfaction be converted into revenue? There are studies which clearly state that customer satisfaction and conversion are linked. Or that personalisation and increased conversion go together. However, conversion, the effects of customer service and satisfaction and similar are much more difficult to put into numbers which are not based purely on statistics. Furthermore, there are many other factors which could influence this. For example, if we enhance customer service capability considerably and NPS (Net Promoter Score) shows that we have great customer satisfaction, however we then have considerable delays due to airport congestion, customer satisfaction may well sink.
5. The investment: of course this could (and some may argue, should) be part of the cost aspect. I have separated this to differentiate between cost savings in operations, servicing, processes, and sales from the actual capex spend. The main investment factors will be in new solution components (or re-engineering existing ones) and into the workforce needed for the project. The investment into people and processes should not be underestimated at this stage. Moving to offer and order without considerably reviewing and rethinking business process and data flows will end up in the rebuilding of legacy. However, with the redesign towards a retail environment, we must also invest into a retail mindset, and an organisation which is structured and trained to understand, live and breathe airline retailing.

While the above categories (cost, revenue, etc.,) are obviously part of any business case, Travel in Motion has seen some of these ignored or forgotten. In some cases, we have seen airlines and vendors challenged to define and decide which elements should be considered for each, and for example, if the soft factors such as improved customer service should be considered or not. These choices will be individual to each airline, and may either be ignored (after careful consideration), included, or used to sway a decision.

Pulling the business case together will not be an easy task. It cannot be done in isolation. The business case must be part of a concept phase where the future target state is discussed, where the architectural concepts are outlined, where the business is involved in helping identify process improvements and current challenges to be overcome and numerous other aspects. Thus, to create a solid business case, there must already be investment into time and resources, and potentially external support from companies such as Travel in Motion or many of our other industry colleagues and competitors. There will be workshops to share knowledge and align concepts between departments, and some airlines have even held workshops with vendors to understand their views on the change. Not a single vendor in the airline commercial space is ignoring this change and each has their own ideas and plans for the transition, which makes them great sources of ideas.

Do not expect the business case to be completed in a week. It is complex and multi-faceted. Do not assign one person in your organisation to try to master this – it is an unfair expectation, as this is extraordinarily complex and requires many parts of the organisation. Do not ignore the true costs, and use a realistic view of the potential revenues. While we would never criticise what companies like Bain and McKinsey did in their studies, we would say that those are ideal and very generic cases.

After all those “do not’s”, here is what we think you should do: plan a process of several months for the concept design of your offer to order transformation, involving various departments in the airline with clear expectations of what offer and order should deliver. Do not shy away from external help, be that from IATA to get an industry perspective, vendors to understand their paths to the future or industry experts like us to give a broader perspective and potentially an “outside in” view.

Daniel Friedli, Travel in Motion AG

This blog was published jointly with Terrapinn.