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AIRLINES & AIR DISTRIBUTION

NDC Is Here. Is Your Booking Engine Ready?

The Context every CTO recognises​What this engagement required THE CHALLENGEWHAT CHANGEDThe OutcomeWhy this matters for your roadmap

​How a global travel enterprise moved from legacy EDIFACT to full NDC operations — without breaking what was already working.

The Context every CTO recognises


Airlines crossed the point of no return on NDC in 2025. Major carriers restructured GDS incentive arrangements, restricted EDIFACT-only content, and accelerated direct distribution. For technology leaders at travel enterprises, this created a specific and difficult problem: NDC content was needed at the front end, but the entire back-office infrastructure — ticketing, servicing, reconciliation, accounting sync — was built for EDIFACT.

The demo is easy. Getting NDC to work in production, alongside legacy GDS channels, without duplicating workflows or creating reconciliation gaps — that's the engineering problem.


The organisations struggling most with NDC are not the ones that failed to integrate NDC content. They're the ones that integrated it but didn't rebuild the operational infrastructure behind it. 


​What this engagement required 


THE CHALLENGE
WHAT CHANGED

  • Full NDC search-to-book flow alongside live Amadeus, Travelport, and Sabre EDIFACT channels

  • Auto-ticketing that understood NDC fare logic, form-of-payment rules, and dynamic tour codes

  • Readback service to sync manually issued NDC tickets back into the reservations platform

  • Cancellation, modification, and void workflows per each airline's NDC API — not assuming GDS standard responses

  • Back-office accounting integration reconciling NDC and GDS transactions in a single financial view

  • End-to-end Amadeus NDC implementation: availability, pricing, booking, auto-ticketing, and post-booking servicing

  • Standalone auto-ticketing service identifying new NDC bookings and issuing tickets with correct forms of payment

  • Readback service maintaining data integrity between NDC-issued tickets and the reservations platform

  • Cancellation and modification APIs built per airline — with structured exception queues for failures

  • Full backward compatibility with existing GDS channels throughout — no operational disruption


The Outcome


The result was a distribution infrastructure operating confidently across both content worlds — NDC and legacy EDIFACT — without manual bridging, reconciliation gaps, or duplicated agent workflows. The platform was positioned to adopt new airline connectivity standards as they emerged, without architectural rework.

3 GDS
channels running in parallel

0 (Zero)
Operational disruption during cutover

3+ Yrs
Strategic Partnership continued

Why this matters for your roadmap

NDC readiness is not a front-end content question. It is a back-office infrastructure question. The CIOs and CTOs who treat it as the former are accumulating technical debt that compounds with every new airline that mandates NDC servicing. The ones who treat it as the latter are building a distribution capability that gets stronger over time.





Talk to our Distribution Engineering team.


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