Ai Editorial: Meeting the “technical aspects” of NDC@Scale

6th March, 2020

Ai Editorial: There are several areas that need to be catered to in order to attain NDC@Scale certification. And one of them pertains to responding to huge volume of NDC queries in a fast and precise manner, writes Ai’s Ritesh Gupta

 

IATA NDC@Scale Certification is being counted upon as a vital development in progressing from working out a real standard to scalability of the same.

This certification is a key component of the airline Leaderboard roadmap towards critical mass. It verifies the ability of an airline to process volumes of NDC sales against certain criteria.

The assessment is around technical setup (ability to run an NDC API on Service Level Agreements with performance requirements for areas such as response time, availability, available transactions per second, error management, etc.), organization setup (work on support needed to connect new partners and to run the operations), use cases (implementation of standardized messages workflows e. g. shopping, servicing etc.) and capabilities. More than 10 airlines have achieved the IATA NDC@Scale Certification.

From an airline’s perspective, the technical set up is a critical aspect for supporting NDC content. Considering the fact the onus is on airline to cater to request coming from the indirect channel, areas that need to be dwelled upon are – dealing with the huge magnitude of queries coming in, ensuring real-time accuracy etc. So if on one hand, airlines have to consider the limitation of a solution like a cache offering, on the other they can’t ignore the return on investment aspect. Response to a search, as also highlighted by Farelogix’s CEO, Jim Davidson, has to be done not only precisely but also in a fast manner. He recently highlighted: “With NDC, an airline’s control of the offer comes with a responsibility to return offers – fast. Enabling airlines to deliver relevant offers based on who’s asking (consumer, corporate, check-in, travel agency, OTA) in a second or less, to me, is the essence of NDC@Scale. For many airlines, that’s plain scary. But it needn’t be, with the right offer engines in place. In fact, with the necessary horsepower, accomplishing NDC@Scale can be fun”.

As Farelogix recommends, offer engines must respond to high-volume, NDC-shopping requests in milliseconds. The team has been highlighting that integration of “airline-controlled shopping and pricing engines with schedule and availability data from sources outside the traditional ecosystem can simultaneously deliver performant response times, as well as lower the costs (e.g. look-to-book)”.  The team also asserts that it imperative for airlines to respond to the nature of the offer in an apt manner.

An area that is in its nascent stages is moving away from static offers. Pricing is being evaluated closely as airlines gear up for offer optimization. Being in control of the offer to the extent that it matches one’s willingness to pay and offers them trip essentials including non-air ancillaries is what is being targeted. And for this, overcoming the limitation of static rule-based methods and real-time calculation of offers is must.

There are a number of questions that need to be answered in order to ably meet the technical requirements while handling a massive volume of NDC searches. All these requirements, as Davidson also recommends, must “think about dynamically constructing and delivering unique and relevant offers based on point-of-inquiry elements”.

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