Order Management in Airlines - Life After PNRs, Tickets and EMDs

Published: July 30, 2024 - Modern Airline Retailing Team

For half a century, airline retailing has depended on three artifacts: the PNR, ticket, and EMD. They worked for a world of static fares and channel silos, but today’s travellers expect personalised offers, transparent servicing, and consistent experiences wherever they shop. To deliver that, airlines are elevating the Order as the single, authoritative record that captures offer acceptance, fulfilment, and service history.

The journey to orders is not a flip of a switch. It is a carefully managed coexistence between order-native capabilities and the legacy stack that still powers settlement, interline, and airport operations. This guide walks through five practical steps to make the transition resilient.

🧩 Step 1 - Define a canonical order

Start with a canonical order model that represents everything you sell. It should cover flights, ancillary products, payments, fulfilment status, servicing rules, and delivery metadata. Include legacy identifiers-record locators, ticket numbers, and EMD references-so the order can bridge to existing clearing and airport systems. Once committed, treat the order as immutable: append servicing events instead of mutating the record to preserve auditability.

🔄 Step 2 - Map the lifecycle clearly

Translate the canonical model into an operational lifecycle so teams know how orders progress from offer to completion.

Stage	What happens	Outcome
Create	Offer acceptance becomes an order, locking price, delivery promises, and servicing rules.	Eliminates post-acceptance fare recalculations.
Fulfil	Seats, ancillaries, and boarding credentials are issued directly from order data.	Provides a single servicing record across channels.
Settle	Revenue accounting reads order line items; tickets or EMDs are generated only where partners demand them.	Simplifies reconciliation and revenue recognition.
Change / Cancel	Change orders append to the original, maintaining a full timeline with financial impact.	Preserves the audit trail for customers and regulators.

⚙️ Step 3 - Build coexistence patterns

Most airlines will run legacy and order-native flows in parallel for years. Layer coexistence mechanisms that keep data aligned without stalling innovation:

Shadow PNR: Maintain a lightweight PNR for host synchronisation and store the locator inside the order for reference.
Ticket envelope: Continue issuing tickets or EMDs when clearing houses require them, mapping each coupon back to its originating order line.
Airport adapter: Expose order data as pseudo-PNR structures for DCS and airport partners that still rely on legacy messages.
Hybrid architecture: Introduce an Order Management layer above the host to safely deliver new retailing capabilities.

🧮 Step 4 - Prepare operations for orders

Order-centric operations change how customer service, finance, and audit teams work. Equip them with tools that make order behaviour visible:

Unified order timeline: Track every change event, the user or system that initiated it, and the financial consequence.
Embedded validation: Guardrails prevent servicing that conflicts with fare conditions, partner policies, or payment status.
Reconciliation dashboards: Compare order revenue, tickets issued, and settlement data to catch mismatches early.
Change management: Train teams on order concepts, retire PNR-centric scripts, and align KPIs to order success metrics.

🚀 Step 5 - Unlock the value

When the order becomes the core record of truth, airlines gain measurable benefits:

Personalised retailing across web, app, and NDC channels.
Faster time to market for new products and partner integrations.
Improved revenue control through accurate, real-time reconciliation.
Richer data for forecasting, pricing, and offer optimisation.
Seamless customer experiences where shopping, servicing, and travel reflect the same record.

Ultimately, an order-first approach decouples customer experience from host constraints while preserving the reliability of legacy infrastructure. Airlines can experiment, personalise, and automate without rewriting decades of core systems overnight.

❓ Frequently asked questions

Can we implement orders without replacing our entire PSS?

Yes. Start with an Order Management System layer that integrates with your host. Use shadow PNRs and ticket envelopes for interoperability while you build order-native flows.

How does this affect interline and codeshare?

Synchronise via order events or APIs. When clearing or partner settlement mandates tickets, map each coupon back to its originating order line so reconciliation stays clean.

What changes for revenue accounting?

Accounting reads data directly from orders and servicing events. Tickets and EMDs become external artefacts rather than the primary accounting source.

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