Thirteen years into NDC, it’s fair to ask: why hasn’t the managed business travel industry made more progress?
From the start, NDC was as an airline-led initiative. The promise was richer content and modern retailing, but the model largely skipped the hard work of aligning incentives and workflows across the global distribution systems (GDSs), the travel management companies (TMCs) the online booking tools (OBTs) and the corporate buyers. Instead, we endured years of finger-pointing about “who’s blocking NDC” while corporate programs wrestled with fragmented content, inconsistent servicing and higher costs.
That’s why Accelya’s NDC FastTrack effort is worth paying attention to.
FastTrack brings together the three GDSs and a growing number of major TMCs, including players like Amex GBT, BCD, FCM, CTM, Fox World Travel, and others, to attack practical adoption issues head-on: timelines, missing functionality, servicing, and integration into managed travel programs. It’s positioned as a cross-industry enablement forum, not a commercial carve-out, and it explicitly includes the corporate buyer voice. That’s a very different starting point from where NDC started life.
As we argued in the New M.O. Airline Moonshot article earlier this year, NDC was never going to succeed at scale if it served mainly as a revenue play for airlines while pushing complexity and cost onto everyone else. McKinsey and others have been clear that modern airline retailing could unlock tens of billions in value by 2030, but that value is supposed to come with better experiences for travelers and travel managers.
FastTrack is, in many ways, a course correction. It acknowledges that:
- TMC and OBT workflows must be designed into NDC, not bolted on after the fact.
- Rather than seek a bypass, GDS infrastructure and roadmaps need to be aligned.
- Corporate buyers and their travelers deserve reliable content, consistent servicing, and clear economics.
- Experiments need to get beyond pilot mode.
The airlines may be the early revenue winners from NDC, but they’re not the only ones who matter. The rest of the value chain is now doing the hard, unglamorous work to make NDC usable at scale for managed travel.
If FastTrack can turn that work into shared standards, predictable delivery, and better outcomes for managed travel programs, it could help the industry finally deliver on the original NDC promise – and on the Moonshot we called for: a mission built on a genuinely shared vision.
