As airline distribution evolves toward a more customized environment, it’s important that the global air travel community create processes that increase efficiency and reduce complexity for all involved.

While New Distribution Capability (NDC) represents immense opportunity, it can also mean increased complexity, especially on a large scale like the U.S. travel industry. ARC is committed to creating a clear, flexible environment that enables our travel industry partners to efficiently do business together — whether through traditional distribution channels, NDC and other means — or even new distribution methods that have yet to emerge. That’s why we are proud to announce that we’ve joined ATPCO and SITA’s NDC Exchange.

NDC Exchange is a hub that facilitates real-time message translation between multiple airlines and sellers. As airlines begin implementing the NDC XML standard for offers, we’re confident they will find themselves on different versions of that standard, whether by choice, or due to NDC program maturity or other factors. ATPCO’s vision to provide a normalization service allowing airlines to interact with each other, in whatever language they happen to be speaking, is critical. Even more valuable will be the ability for aggregators or sellers to access airline content for all airlines participating in the NDC Exchange through a single “pipe” in whatever version of the NDC XML standard that aggregator or seller is using. That’s big.

By partnering with ATPCO and SITA, we will combine our efforts to maximize effectiveness. As I’ve mentioned before, collaboration is key to advancing our air travel ecosystem. We plan to explore the variety of ways our organizations can share insights and data to benefit the global air travel community. We’re still in the very early stages of this process, but we have already identified four workstreams that might significantly enhance the NDC Exchange by incorporating ARC’s accreditation and settlement capabilities. We are confident that, by cooperating and working through industry challenges together, we will create an optimized environment conducive to growth.

We want to make sure ARC’s customers continue to benefit from reliable services that streamline operations and increase efficiency. Managing complex processes has been one of ARC’s core strengths for more than 50 years — our role in the industry centers on facilitating commerce between hundreds of airlines and more than 12,000 travel agency locations.

Whether it’s our agent accreditation, which requires travel agencies to meet a rigorous set of organizational and financial qualifications; our trustworthy settlement services that distribute accurate, timely payments across thousands of entities every week; or our comprehensive global data that fuels business intelligence, we are committed to helping our customers achieve success. We are proud to partner with ATPCO and SITA to ensure yet another layer of seamless support in the new distribution landscape.

To learn more about ARC’s vision for NDC and enhanced distribution, visit our distribution webpage.