NDC becomes real the moment live orders start flowing through sellers that are not your own digital channels. IATA’s 2024 industry pulse showed that 48% of indirect bookings touching an NDC API still required manual servicing within 48 hours. Most breakdowns were not caused by the schema-it was unclear ownership of caching, payment evidence, or disruption messaging. This article breaks down the responsibilities so each side can prepare before volume arrives.
Field data: carriers in the IATA Leaderboard report a 35% drop in debit memos once sellers and airlines agree on a joint operating manual. Use the sections below as a template for that manual.
What a seller must own
Sellers curate the traveler experience and therefore carry the burden of presenting stable, bookable content. The most resilient partners treat the airline integration like a product, not a one-off project.
- Channel UX and caching: Design cache lifetimes with the airline’s offer reuse policy in mind. Surface when content is stale instead of silently falling back to legacy fares.
- Shopping guardrails: Monitor request burst rates, authentication renewal, and replay logic. Airlines increasingly auto-block endpoints after three consecutive throttle violations.
- Order integrity: Pass through every data element collected from the traveler-ancillary selections, seat bundles, payment references, invoicing data. Airlines assume anything missing is unsold.
- Servicing readiness: Map common change and refund flows before launch and rehearse them. 62% of seller escalations in 2023 were for basic voluntary date changes that lacked automation.
| Seller KPI | Target | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Offer cache freshness | < 5 minutes during schedule changes | Prevents quoting fares the airline already withdrew. |
| Order transmission completeness | > 99.5% | Reduces debit memos and check-in surprises. |
| Servicing auto-completion | > 85% of change/refund requests | Signals mature integration and frees airline call centres. |
What the airline cannot delegate
The airline owns the product, inventory, and regulatory accountability. Even the best seller cannot compensate for missing artefacts or inconsistent servicing promises.
- Stable API contracts: Publish version roadmaps, change logs, and sample payloads. Provide at least 90 days’ notice for breaking changes.
- Operational discipline: Run offer and order APIs with explicit SLAs, incident channels, and sandbox environments seeded with realistic data. A 300 ms improvement in order response time typically lifts conversion by 2–3 percentage points.
- Full-servicing coverage: If you sell something via NDC-branded fares, paid seats, disruption waivers-ensure the same flows are supported via servicing APIs or staffed queues.
- Settlement transparency: Deliver reconciliation files, EMV payment evidence, and EMD associations on the timelines sellers commit to their finance teams.
Joint operating rhythm
Many programmes fail because there is no shared view of day-to-day operations. Establish a cadence and make the artefacts visible.
| Cadence | Artefact | Owner | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly | Operational scorecard | Airline analytics with seller ops | Latency, error rates, cache misses, servicing backlog. |
| Bi-weekly | Product roadmap review | Airline product + seller product | Upcoming fares/ancillaries, rich media updates, test plans. |
| Monthly | Disruption drill | Joint | Simulate irregular ops message, ensure both sides notify travellers. |
| Quarterly | Risk and compliance audit | Airline finance & seller compliance | Chargebacks, refund ageing, regulatory updates. |
Data to keep on the dashboard
Dashboards should focus on actionable metrics, not vanity totals.
- Offer-to-order conversion: Break down by fare family and ancillary bundle to spot content gaps.
- Servicing deflection: Track what percentage of voluntary changes, involuntary disruptions, and refunds complete digitally. Anything below 70% needs process fixes.
- Payment authorisation reuse: Monitor when stored credentials fail during reissues; high failure rates hint at misaligned PCI flows.
- Dispute ratio: Keep ADR/ADM issuance per 1,000 orders under 0.5; spikes usually trace back to missing audit data.
Designing servicing flows together
Voluntary changes and involuntary disruptions require tight loops. Map each scenario in a shared RACI so nobody hesitates when the airport desk is calling.
- Voluntary changes: Seller gathers traveler intent, runs repricing, sends order change. Airline confirms or returns alternatives within the agreed SLA.
- Involuntary disruption: Airline pushes a disruption order change with re-accommodation options. Seller notifies the traveler and captures acceptance or new preferences.
- Refunds: Seller validates refundability, submits structured requests (or Cat 33) and returns status updates through their support channels.
Automate reconciliation wherever possible: when a seller submits a change request, return a unique reference and status updates via webhooks or polling APIs. Keep an auditable trail of every payload; regulators are increasingly asking for them during customer complaints.
Success with NDC looks almost boring: predictable releases, no hidden fare ladders, and quick recovery when a dependency fails. Write down who owns each part of the journey and refresh the agreement quarterly. When both sides do that, the traveler never notices the machinery behind the scenes.