The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the global airline representative body which has 240 member airlines responsible for 84% of world air traffic, is to examine the technical feasibility of its planned New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard during the first half of this year. Should all go well, IATA intends to launch NDC pilot projects before the end of the year.

“The project was launched by the [IATA] board of governors,” explained association senior VP: industry, distribution and financial services Aleks Popovich at a press briefing in Sandton, north of Johannesburg, on Thursday. “It’s a standard. What IATA does is standards for industry. That’s our core business.”

“The NDC is a standard for airlines to sell their full products through travel agents,” he elucidated. “Far from bypassing the travel agents, we want to go through them. The NDC is simply about doing merchandising through the travel agent channel and for customers to do comparative shopping for full airline products.”

The intent is also to benefit the existing Global Distribution System (GDS) enterprises which provide centralised travel booking services. “The GDSs are actually collaborating with us on this project. They are participating very actively in this process,” he reported.

The hope is that the NDC will increase transparency for the consumer, increase competition and boost revenue for all in the industry. The airline industry has suffered from low profitability for decades. Over the past 40 years, the average operating margin for the world’s airlines has been 0.1%. “This is not healthy,” stated Popovich.

The NDC programme was launched by IATA after the World Passenger Symposium in October 2011. “It came from a dialogue involving travel agents and airlines.” In October last year the IATA member airlines agreed to the proposed Foundation Standard for the NDC. This is now being implemented.

“It describes what the standard will look like, but at a very high level,” he said. “It comprises ten pages. We are committed to collaboration with travel agents, GDSs and IT [information technology] providers. It’s an open standard, developed with broad participation. IATA will not be writing the software. It’s a standard, a common language, enabling common communication with each other. These are XML [Extensible Markup language] standards because these are, right now, the most flexible standards around.” XML is now dominant, but not yet universal, in the air travel industry.