The Year In Review

New Distribution Capability gets legs 

It wasn’t long ago that the GDSs stood in firm resistance to IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC), viewing it as a disintermediation tool designed to cut them out of airline booking channels.

In 2018, that resistance, six years in the making, became a distant memory. 

Over the summer, GDSs made a series of announcements about efforts to develop and test NDC-enabled solutions, implying a promise of more to come. 

Sabre and Amadeus in August forged NDC partnerships with several major travel management companies. In October, Travelport said it had become the first GDS to employ NDC to manage a live flight booking. 

Perhaps the most significant development was Sabre’s $360 million acquisition of Farelogix in November, which was largely seen by analysts as giving Sabre a significant NDC advantage over its competitors. 

Airlines also accelerated their moves toward NDC. In October, Delta, United, British Airways, Finnair and Latam joined NDC Exchange, a marketplace for airline product sales. The Exchange, supported by NDC, is especially useful for the purchase of ancillary products such as checked bags and bundled fares, which are largely unavailable through the GDSs. It went live this year, with Air Canada as its first member airline. 

Resistance is indeed futile. 

AI in travel 

It wasn’t so long ago that artificial intelligence (AI) seemed like a mysterious sci-fi technology. But in 2018, it seemed not a week went by without some kind of new AI adoption in sectors across the industry. 

In November, American Express Global Business Travel partnered with Lola.com, an agency that employs a travel chat app powered by AI. 

In August, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCCL) became the first cruise company to offer automated chat, as opposed to online chatting with a customer service staffer, when it added an AI-based technology to its CruisingPower.com website. The addition offered another option for travel advisers to interact with the company’s contact centers, saying its goal was to provide a faster way for agents to do business with RCCL.

Over the summer, Travelport partnered with IBM to create IBM Travel Manager, a platform that uses AI to help businesses manage corporate travel spending. 

In April, Virtuoso for the first time accepted companies focused on AI into its Incubator program. And in the past two months, Booking.com and Expedia each said it was advancing its use of AI to communicate with both suppliers and customers and to deliver search results. 

Where will this all lead? Check back at the culmination of 2019. 

Dry rivers 

It wasn’t the kind of travel story any company wanted: The record hot, dry summer in Europe, which persisted into fall, had river cruise lines scrambling throughout their peak season to reroute ships and keep customers sailing and happy. 

High and low water levels are cyclical, and river ships are always prepared to reroute and if necessary to bus passengers to different ships or hotels to complete their itineraries during peak summer heat. 

But for such low levels to carry into October and November was unprecedented. While the Danube and the Elbe were most affected over the summer, river lines this fall had to abandon the popular Basel-Amsterdam sailings on the Rhine when the port of Cologne, Germany, was shuttered. 

River cruise lines know that rivers are an unpredictable force of nature, like snowfall for ski resorts or hurricanes for beach destinations. This year, their extensive backup plans were put to the test, and by many accounts, they performed as well as could be expected. Whether the river lines had to swap passengers between ships at impassable points, put them in hotels or on motorcoaches to keep their tours going or develop alternative itineraries, this was not a river cruise season any line hopes to repeat.