Laying Down the Tracks for NDC

Best Practitioner: Brian Hendrickson, Oracle Travel Operations Director 

Best Practice: For working with GetThere, Sabre, CWT and a number of airlines, specifically American Airlines, to enable, test and drive improvement across a legacy ecosystem for New Distribution Capability. In the past six months, Oracle has put 5 percent of its air volume through NDC channels, with an estimated savings of $500K. The move has also encouraged travelers to stay within the program and not seek low fares or product visibility elsewhere. 

BTN: From what I understand, you were hopeful in the time between the American Airlines announcement in December 2022 that it would remove content from EDIFACT channels to the NDC switchover on April 1, 2023, that your agency, CWT, would have a solution ready, but three weeks out, it wasn’t there. Paint a picture of that moment.  

Hendrickson: They were building everything in their ecosystem to be ready as much as they could—the agent desktop, some of the reporting. But they were trying to build for an ecosystem, where we are trying to build for one account—Oracle. They came to us and said, “This is too complex to lift and shift off the ground for day one. We’re just not going to be able to do it.”  

Where did you go from there? 

Hendrickson: That was, as you said, about three weeks out from the go-live date for American. We were on with the CWT NDC team, and we have a dedicated account management team at CWT that manages our business. There’s a Six Sigma black belt on that side, so I said, “I have resources. If we can get this done, do you mind if we go live?” And they said, “Go for it.” So we looked at where CWT was in their maturity process, and we looked at Sabre Red 360 and GetThere. And we mashed them all together and got a touchless NDC ticket to go through just a few days before the American go-live date.  

What did “mashing them all together” actually entail? That’s a fun way to say you did a lot of work, I imagine. 

Hendrickson: Ok. This may get really detailed. 

Go for it.  

Hendrickson: When we got involved, GetThere could only show NDC content in a price-search scenario, but we had search by time turned on, and we weren’t willing to change that user experience. In order to get the NDC content through, we did have to switch to what GetThere calls its “shelves” display, so that’s an enhanced display. So we moved to shelves on April 1, and we configured it only to show NDC if that content was at a lower fare than EDIFACT, and travelers could choose that lower fare. So it wasn’t 100 percent up front to the user on day one, but we took the approach of doing the best we could to show something.  

We also decided not to worry about agents having to do everything offline up front; they just needed to be able to recognize [an NDC booking] and service it if it came through. We deployed Oracle-specific training to CWT and then actually helped develop all the training for CWT NDC programs based on the Oracle data.  

We actually have a desktop overlay on Sabre Red 360 [for Oracle]. So the agents had to toggle into SR360 in order to service the bookings, because they don’t come through the desktop normally.  

So what was the rate of NDC transactions in, say, the first month? 

Hendrickson: In the infancy stages, it was like 40 transactions. So it was low, but we were live. And we were learning.  

And fast forward, what is the rate of NDC bookings now? 

Hendrickson: Transactions are significant; we’ve booked well over $1 million in NDC on thousands of transactions. And that’s thanks to enhancements over time, like GetThere moving NDC to the search-by-time functionality, so we’ve been able to get that preferred experience to the user.  

Bring me into that evolution, from 40 transactions to thousands… 

Hendrickson: Servicing had to get better and functionality had to get better before we could adopt globally. But in the infancy stages, Oracle got Sabre and GetThere on the phone for twice-weekly calls to go through functionality because, in all honesty, Sabre Red 360 wasn’t up to where it needed to be to service bookings. Through our relationship with GetThere, we brought Sabre developers on [the call] and said, “this isn’t working” and “this isn’t working” and “this isn’t working.” We were showing them things in the ecosystem that needed to be fixed and, in the beginning, there were a lot of them. 

But we are happy to work with our suppliers and we worked with United and American directly to get this mature, but we’ve had a cadence of break fixes within the system, specifically with Sabre, and they’ve taken that feedback and done development that’s been good for everyone—and good for Oracle. And it’s not just for one carrier, Sabre has honed its approach with new carriers coming on with NDC. 

What were your plans if it really didn’t work? 

Hendrickson: Well, someone had to help make this happen. We just took the stance that if it breaks, we can turn it off. You know? Although we never had to do that.

And can you estimate your savings on NDC tickets versus what was available in EDIFACT?  

Hendrickson: On a roundtrip fare, depending on cabin class, the savings is $80 to $120 on average. So far this calendar year only, we’ve saved about $500,000.  

How did it hit you to have done all this work and then for American to backtrack and return content into EDIFACT channels? 

Hendrickson: Just to be clear, we did not enable NDC for the sake of wanting to be American Airlines supporters, you know? We did it to enable our travelers to have the best fare options available so they don’t have to go outside our ecosystem. We feel that American was a little heavy-handed initially by giving a go-live date without the ecosystem being ready. But somebody had to do it. Now that they are pulling back, I’m actually disappointed … because the industry could lose momentum with NDC. Pulling back just gives everyone a sense … that they can go back to old ways. I don’t think that’s what the industry needs.