TPConnects Technologies has launched Iris Express API, a lightweight booking interface built on top of its existing Iris platform, designed to reduce the technical overhead that has long made NDC adoption slow and costly for travel sellers.
The product targets one of the most persistent complaints in airline distribution: that NDC’s payload sizes and schema complexity create long development cycles and sluggish response times. Full NDC implementations often involve hundreds of data fields and significantly larger message payloads than traditional booking interfaces, increasing both development costs and response times, particularly for smaller travel sellers who lack the engineering resources to absorb that burden.
Iris Express API sits inside the Iris platform and gives travel sellers access to full airline content, including seats and ancillaries, through a simplified booking flow with significantly smaller response sizes. The premise is that sellers should not have to navigate the full weight of NDC schema architecture to access the content NDC enables.
TPConnects operates in a crowded but still-consolidating segment. Verteil, Duffel, AirGateway, and Mystifly are among the players competing for the same travel seller relationships, each with a variation on the same core proposition: cleaner, faster access to airline NDC content without the full integration burden of a direct airline connection. What differentiates them increasingly comes down to market focus, pricing architecture, and precisely the kind of performance optimization Iris Express API is targeting.
The launch reflects a broader pattern taking shape in the distribution technology market. NDC aggregators and middleware providers are increasingly competing not just on content breadth but on how cleanly and quickly they can deliver that content to the seller layer. Response speed, long treated as an engineering concern, is being reframed as a commercial one, with direct implications for conversion rates across web, mobile, and next-generation booking interfaces.
TPConnects has positioned Iris as a platform for travel sellers across multiple markets, with a footprint that includes activity across Africa and the Middle East, two regions where lean integration solutions carry particular weight given infrastructure constraints.
As airlines continue shifting more content and ancillary products into NDC channels, the competitive battleground among aggregators is increasingly moving from content access to content delivery. The providers that can make NDC easier to implement, faster to consume, and cheaper to maintain may be best positioned to capture the next phase of travel seller adoption.
