Sam Abdou, executive vice president, air, rail & global online, Amadeus, sums it up thus: “GDSs are evolving massively. They are e-commerce platforms, so more than ever relevant. They are evolving from a single point of aggregation (EDIFACT) to multiple channels which includes NDC.” Yes, GDSs are evolving from being the vast data depositories which at one time were said to have been exceeded in data storage volume only by that of the US Department of Defense. They held the information on availability, seating, pricing and more of every IATA airline flight in the world. Why should there be any problem? The GDSs’ challenges are rooted in that history of plenty. According to Ann Cederhall of LeapShift, “Distribution was simplistic. GDS was an extension of airlines’ reservation systems. They figured this would be a better way to offer content to travel agents so they could book on these systems. I personally think this all went wrong when airlines no longer had ownership in these companies.” Perhaps this is because both Sabre and Amadeus still run the airline IT businesses which were part of the original package as well (Travelport has sold its to Delta). Cederhall believes that making NDC content available to third-party distributors such as GDSs is challenging for the majority of the world’s airlines because they don’t own their own APIs. The dual businesses also complicates the model. Amadeus is commercially obliged to maximise the revenue out of two distinct entities which is an impediment to its developing, for example, something on its air IT side that might harm the GDS side of its business. Having that factor to consider has the potential to impede innovation
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SPRING 2023 | businesstravelnewseurope.com
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