In February, former Sabre executive Brett Burgess took over as CEO of ATPCO, the airline fare-filing repository and provider of distribution technology. Airlines editor Robert Silk spoke with Burgess about NDC adoption, ATPCO's role as airline distribution evolves and what he's learned so far.
Brett Burgess
Q: What has surprised you the most in your short time at ATPCO?
A: Just how vital ATPCO remains. There are narratives that ATPCO is going away, becoming less relevant. And what I found when I started digging into the data is that actually we've grown at double digits every year for the last five years in terms of the number of fares managed. A company that's no longer relevant doesn't tend to grow at double digits in terms of usage.
Q: What is the current percentage of NDC bookings compared to bookings from filed fares using legacy Edifact technology?
A: What we're seeing is about 88% of indirect bookings are still coming through Edifact, and Edifact still represents 94% of TMC bookings. What we're actually seeing is airlines are still using filed fares to convey the information contained in an NDC offer. NDC engines are doing the fare construction and making the offers using filed fares. Now, not every airline is doing that, but many airlines who have adopted NDC have chosen to also still use filed fares to help manage their offers. So, using NDC doesn't mean the filed fare goes away. We should stop talking about the adoption of NDC in the same breath that we talk about the end of file fares.
Q: ATPCO says it files 1.5 billion records a day and that during the early period of the Iran war, when fuel prices surged, fare changes spiked from 20 million to 80 million per day. How challenging was that for your technical infrastructure?
A: We handled every single one of those change requests. What we did see was a little bit of slowness in how we responded to those changes and how we were able to turn around those changes to distribute them to the travel agencies that buy the data. The way airlines are using fares now is not the same way that they used fares even 10 years ago. It's a much more dynamic environment, and so I expect that the volatility of fare changes will go up, and we are investing in our technology foundations to make sure that we can handle that flexibly. In fact, we're putting in major upgrades to our systems in January to make sure that we can handle the annual peaks, which we usually see in the March and April timeframe.
Q: Why are there more fare changes these days?
A: The technologies and the data that's available is allowing airlines to be much more responsive to market changes now than in the past, and as a result, they use ATPCO to execute those offer changes -- their own competitive responses -- and they're trying to get that closer to real time.
Q:Let's talk about offer-and-order, or One Order, the effort by some airlines to replace etickets, PNRs and ancillary purchase records with a single digital record that can be managed throughout the post-booking journey. In theory, One Order will improve order management and ease changes for passengers. ATPCO says fewer than 25 airlines have formally committed to it. Will adoption accelerate?
A: What we're seeing is a really promising capability in offer/orders, but only some airlines have an appetite for doing that right now, and I think there's going to be a very slow adoption globally across all airlines, probably over the next 20 years. That's what the data says, but also that's what we're hearing as we talk to airlines in the market.
__________________________
This interview was edited for length and clarity.