American Airlines, American Express Global Business Travel and Amadeus announced completion of their first New Distribution Capability (NDC) bookings last week, hailing what Amadeus described as a “critical milestone”.
They revealed they had processed live bookings by American Express GBT using American Airlines’ NDC-enabled content via the Amadeus Travel API (application programme interface).
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However, the achievement marks merely a stage on the road to NDC development.
In a statement, the companies noted: “This is an important step forward for airline retailing.” But they acknowledged “full functionality of end-to-end booking flow and service, including cancellations, exchanges and ancillaries” would depend on “when capabilities reach scalable production levels”.
Gianni Pisanello, vice‑president of Amadeus’s NDC-X programme, said: “We have reached another critical milestone with two travel industry giants.”
However, NDC technology is not yet at the point “where travel agencies can shop, book and service NDC bookings at scale and match current performance levels”.
