Accelya Kale Solutions-Niche & Sticky Business

Adding some more insights on the implication of NDC adoption –

1. NDC decreases the value add of GDS companies like Sabre, Travelport. (How? Single integration with NDC APIs of airlines which gives out all offer and order related details. Infact ability to provide auxiliary offerings like luggage, seat, lounge, tour packages etc. is an add-on under NDC. In the existing pattern, GDS system maintain multiple integration with airlines (and other 3rd parties) to bring all these offerings under 1 roof. NDC will move this value add and move it inside airline servers.

2. What does it mean for airlines?
   (a) Relatively lower service fees paid to GDS – Lower fees due to lesser value add compared to existing integration. This incentives airlines to move towards NDC. (This is an educated guess and yet to find a very specific evidence from airlines or GDS companies’ annual reports/concalls. A quick scan to Sabre stock price chart and financials does confirm this theory. Sabre’s latest qrtly revenue is yet to reach 2016’s qtrly runrate).
   (b) Shifting of traffic to airline websites – As and when airlines rolls out NDC alongwith removing Edifact based content, in the short term, all the OTAs and TMCs who do not have NDC integration with GDS, will not be able to provide NDC based content to customers. In the short term, until NDC integration gets built into OTAs and TMCs, customer traffic will shift to airline websites. This just played out with American Airlines who took a bold step of removing Edifact content, and still able to maintain their revenues. [1] [2]

Now what does all of the above mean to companies like Accelya?

1. As already highlighted by @saurabhved above, airlines sees incentives to move towards NDCs, and Accelya gets one-time opportunity to build it for them.
   (Note that there are airlines like Delta who do not have any plans to move to NDC and favor staying with existing integration mainly to avoid any impact to corporate bookings which are through TMCs like cwt, which do not have NDC integrations with GDSes)
2. On top of air traffic growth, there is an optionality for Accelya as traffic shifts to airline websites Remains to be seen whether the shift is permanent or temporary, which depends on the evolution of seller side (GDS, aggregators, TMCs, OTAs).

Related resources –

1. https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Airlines-NDC-plans-fragment-distribution
2. https://travelprofessionalnews.com/ndc-a-disrupter-or-opportunity-for-travel-professionals-in-2023/
3. https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/American-plans-NDC-acceleration
4. https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/American-Airlines-boasts-direct-bookings-are-on-the-rise