More recently, American Airlines has announced that it has signed agreements with all three GDSs, stating that the agreements will provide it with "content flexibility" that will allow it to offer its products and services to agents and corporate customers through NDC connections.
At the WAF, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce says that while NDC put the framework in place, not everything is under the airline's control.
"With NDC, for example, we have to work with the GDSs and the travel agents, who also have to make significant investments," he says.
"There is a massive movement of the whole chain, and that doesn't happen overnight and some are quicker than others. You want to bring everyone with you, but that's also an obstacle to making a lot of progress in something that is well defined like the NDC, and you can imagine the complexity in some of the other systems."
Risky business
IATA's Walsh was also asked whether it could be a "big bang" solution or whether it should be done in stages because of the risks.
"Personally, as a former director general, I would say do it gradually. As an IATA I would say: 'You guys are crazy, take this and make a leap'. But I know that if I tried to convince the IATA board to do it, it's too big a risk, but we'll get there. We have fantastic technology, it's a matter of adopting it at the right time and at the right speed," he says.
As for how transformative the move to digital could be if the legacy technology issues were resolved, Joyce says: "I think it's one of the biggest transformations that any airline would have on their list for the next while. At the moment we are coming out of operational problems across the board. During COVID we moved a lot of systems - we didn't change them - to the cloud. We've had technical problems with that, which has caused us long delays at times when systems haven't worked at all.
"So, coming out of this, we're all going to be cautious as CEOs. We don't want to add pressure to the operational side of the business, we don't want to take risks on the commercial side. We don't want to find ourselves in a situation where our website or our distribution goes offline for a period of time; that's millions of dollars," he says.
And then, especially now, you have to make sure that any move is done with cyber security and safety in mind and minimising the risks. Airlines are good at identifying and managing risk. We will get there, but we have to be careful not to do it too quickly, not to create unintended consequences that set the industry back."
As to whether airlines should outsource development to third-party technology companies or keep it as a core competency, Marjan Rintel, CEO of KLM, believes it may not be possible to outsource.
"If you look at the operational processes and legacy systems of airlines, they are all connected, so it is not so easy to say whether it is possible to outsource. I don't think so, I think it's at the core of their processes and at the core of their customer service," he says.
"We agreed, within KLM at least, for the next five to ten years to really get rid of the legacy systems and accelerate what needs to be done."
Working together may be the mantra, but the reality has been different so far. In the past, airlines have taken different approaches to initiatives such as NDC, often for commercial reasons. The big question is whether that can change in the future.
Author: Jorge Coromina