The narrative around NDC has shifted. After years of contested adoption, regulatory pressure, and airline surcharge wars, the distribution debate has moved on from whether NDC works to who profits from it. And the answer, for now, is complicated.
NDC aggregators have emerged as the clearest structural winners of the distribution transformation. Airlines went direct. Agencies needed a bridge. The aggregators built it. Companies like Verteil, AirGateway, TPConnects, and Duffel now sit between airlines and travel sellers, normalizing content, managing exceptions, and charging for the privilege. The model is elegant. The question is whether it is profitable.
The Middle Layer That Would Not Die
There is a version of the NDC story where the aggregator disappears. Airlines distribute directly, agencies connect individually, and the middleware is engineered out of existence. That version was always a fantasy.
A mid-size travel agency managing bookings across dozens of carriers cannot realistically maintain live NDC connections with each one. The technical overhead alone, separate API credentials per airline, per market, per distribution channel, is prohibitive. Someone has to sit in the middle and absorb that complexity. That someone is the aggregator.
What changed with NDC is not the existence of the middleware layer. It is who runs it and on what terms. The GDS was the original aggregator. It just happened to be one that served airlines and agencies on terms designed decades ago, built on EDIFACT, and progressively misaligned with what airlines actually wanted from distribution.
The pure-play NDC aggregators stepped in to offer something different: modern APIs, faster onboarding, no GDS surcharge, and in many cases, a genuine willingness to serve markets and carriers the legacy players underserved. That is a real value proposition. The market has responded accordingly.
A Market Taking Shape
The numbers suggest genuine momentum. The NDC aggregator market was valued at approximately $1.8 billion in 2025, with projections pointing toward $5.4 billion by 2034. Pure-play players are growing faster than the GDS incumbents, even as Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport continue to hold the largest share of aggregator revenues by virtue of their existing scale.
Duffel, the London-based aggregator backed by over $100 million in venture capital, was processing more than five million NDC transactions monthly as of mid-2025. AirGateway, headquartered in Berlin, now serves over 500 IATA-accredited agencies across more than 45 countries with live connections to more than 35 airlines. TPConnects has built particular strength in the Middle East and South Asian markets, with carriers like Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Riyadh Air running their NDC programs through its platform. Verteil has positioned itself around Asian and Gulf carriers, focusing on markets where GDS coverage was always thin and the appetite for alternatives is highest.
The adoption signals are visible at the agency level too. Flight Centre Travel Group, one of the world’s largest travel consortia, implemented TPConnects to access NDC content alongside its existing GDS workflow. Lufthansa City Center, in collaboration with AirGateway, rolled out an aggregator platform to its network of approximately 500 agencies, giving them access to over 30 NDC and LCC carriers through a single interface.
These are not pilot programs. These are operational relationships at meaningful scale.
The Revenue Model and Its Tensions
Understanding whether aggregators are profitable requires understanding how they make money, which is less transparent than the industry often acknowledges.
The primary model is a two-sided marketplace with fees on both ends. Airlines pay to have their NDC content distributed to agencies they could not efficiently reach on their own. Agencies pay for aggregated access to airline content through a single normalized connection rather than managing bilateral contracts with every carrier. The aggregator sits in the middle and charges for the infrastructure.
In practice, revenue takes several forms. Transaction fees apply on a per-booking basis. API access fees may apply as subscription or consumption-based charges. Implementation and onboarding fees are common at the airline side. Some aggregators have moved toward a model where the agency pays a platform fee rather than being subsidized by the airline, reflecting a shift in who the aggregator’s primary commercial relationship is with.
The tension in this model is real. Airlines historically funded GDS distribution through incentive payments to agencies. NDC inverted the economics: airlines want to reduce distribution costs, not simply redirect them. For aggregators to capture value, they need airlines to see them as cost-efficient distribution infrastructure rather than simply another layer in a chain the airline is already paying to bypass.
That means the aggregator’s pricing power is structurally constrained on the airline side. Too expensive and the airline goes direct, even if direct means under-distributing to agency markets it cannot efficiently reach on its own. Too cheap and the aggregator cannot sustain the technical investment required to maintain live connections, handle disruptions, and iterate on functionality.
The agency side presents a different problem. Travel agencies are not accustomed to paying for content access. The GDS model historically meant the agency received booking incentives, effectively being paid to use the system. Asking agencies to pay a platform fee, however modest, is a behavioral and commercial shift that not every agency market has absorbed at the same pace.
The Volume Question
Profitability in this model depends almost entirely on transaction volume per connection.
Building and maintaining an NDC connection is expensive. There is engineering cost for the initial integration, ongoing cost for maintaining compatibility as airlines update their implementations, and operational cost for handling the edge cases that NDC, despite a decade of development, continues to produce at non-trivial frequency. Post-booking servicing, changes, cancellations, disruption handling, all of it requires active infrastructure investment.
A live NDC connection that generates modest booking volume is a cost center. The same connection at high volume becomes a margin engine. The economics are not linear.
This is why the aggregators that will break out are the ones with genuine transaction density across their airline portfolio, not just the ones with the longest list of signed airline connections. A company can publish 30 airline logos on its website and still be burning cash if those connections are underutilized. The commercial substance is in what moves through the pipe.
Duffel’s five million monthly transactions is a reference point worth noting. It suggests that at sufficient scale, the consumption-based model works. The question for every other pure-play aggregator is at what transaction volume the unit economics turn positive, and how close they are to that threshold.
The Defensibility Problem
Even as aggregators grow, a structural vulnerability remains.
The aggregator layer exists because connecting to multiple airlines individually is too expensive for most agencies. But as NDC matures and airline implementations stabilize, the cost of direct connection falls. Large agencies with sufficient volume may eventually conclude that bilateral connections with their top ten or twenty carriers are more cost-effective than paying an aggregator for the same access. Some are already moving in this direction.
The aggregator’s response to this risk is to build functionality that goes beyond pure content aggregation. The best players in the market are investing in pricing control tools, agency desktop interfaces, sub-agency hierarchy management, post-booking automation, and analytics that an agency cannot replicate through direct connections alone. The value proposition shifts from “we connect you to airlines” to “we manage your entire NDC retailing operation.”
This is the right strategic direction. It is also an expensive one that requires sustained engineering investment before it generates commercial return.
Who Is Actually Making Money?
The honest answer is that nobody outside the cap tables of these companies knows with certainty.
What can be observed is behavioral. Companies that are running out of money get quiet. They slow hiring, stop attending industry events, and reduce commercial activity. Verteil is signing partnerships and its principals are visible at industry gatherings. AirGateway is expanding its agency network. TPConnects is landing contracts with carriers as significant as Qatar Airways and Riyadh Air. These are not the behaviors of organizations in financial distress.
Duffel, with over $100 million raised and a consumption-based model aimed at developer-first travel companies, is likely the furthest along in pure transaction volume. Whether that volume translates to profitability depends on burn rate assumptions that are not public.
For the regional pure-plays like Verteil, TPConnects, and AirGateway, the more realistic picture is probably one of positive unit economics on their core connections with runway pressure from ongoing engineering and commercial investment. These are not yet mature businesses with stable profit margins. They are growth-stage infrastructure companies in a market that is still sorting itself out.
The M&A signal is worth watching. Industry analysts expect two to three significant consolidation events in the NDC aggregator space by 2027. That is typically a signal that some players have built genuine assets and others need an exit. When the deals start happening, the real economics of these businesses will become visible.
The Aggregation Imperative
Underlying the profitability question is a structural truth that the industry sometimes obscures in its enthusiasm for direct distribution narratives.
Airlines going direct does not eliminate the need for aggregation. It creates it. If every major carrier develops its own NDC program with its own API, its own credential requirements, and its own implementation quirks, the complexity for any agency trying to sell across carriers multiplies rather than shrinks. The aggregator’s job becomes more important, not less, as the number of direct channels proliferates.
The GDS was never just a content pipe. It was a normalizing layer that made multi-carrier booking operationally manageable for agencies at scale. NDC aggregators are rebuilding that normalizing layer on modern infrastructure, with different economics and a different power dynamic between airlines, intermediaries, and sellers.
They are winning that structural argument. The distribution industry needs them. The remaining question is how long it takes for the transaction volumes to catch up with the infrastructure cost, and which of today’s players will still be standing independently when they do.
That is not a story about technology. It is a story about business model endurance in a market that has historically been unforgiving to middleware that cannot justify its place in the chain.
The aggregators have justified their place. Now they have to make it pay.
