Airlines have learned how to monetize the passenger beyond the ticket. According to the 2026 SeatMaps.com Yearbook of Ancillary Revenue, produced by IdeaWorksCompany, total ancillary revenue across 58 airlines tracked in both the 2025 and 2026 editions grew 13.4% in 2025, nearly double the 7.2% growth in total revenue across the same carriers.
That is where the ancillary story stops being a revenue story and becomes a distribution story. The next competitive advantage is not simply selling more add-ons. It is making sure those add-ons can be sold everywhere the ticket itself is sold.
The headline numbers back this up. Thirty of the 58 airlines in the study generated at least $1 billion in ancillary revenue in 2025, up from 27 a year earlier. United Airlines led in absolute terms, with $11.5 billion in ancillary revenue, up 9.3% year over year. Frontier Airlines led on ancillary share of total revenue, at 60.2%. Jet2.com set a new per-passenger record at $100.73. Southwest, newly charging for checked bags, saw its per-passenger ancillary figure jump nearly 20% to $58.25.
Jay Sorensen, the report’s author and president of IdeaWorksCompany, attributes the growth less to novelty fees than to two specific mechanics: seat assignment charges and branded fares.
Both are pricing tools. Neither works to its full potential unless the airline’s retailing infrastructure can actually present them to a shopper at the moment of choice, in whatever channel that shopper happens to be using.
A branded fare is only truly a branded offer if the fare family, its rules and its ancillary bundle can be constructed and displayed as a coherent proposition.
On an airline’s own website, that is largely a solved problem. Most carriers have controlled their direct-channel shopping experience for years. The harder test is what happens away from the airline’s own site, in an OTA, a travel management platform or a traditional GDS environment.
An airline that sells branded fares and seat-assignment upsells effectively on its own website but falls back to a flat, undifferentiated fare in parts of its indirect distribution is not capturing the ancillary opportunity across its entire network. It is capturing it only where its retailing stack reaches.
That distinction matters because a growing share of airline revenue is no longer created by the base fare alone. The commercial proposition increasingly consists of the fare plus seats, bags, priority services, flexibility, meals, upgrades and other products, and if those products disappear, become difficult to display or cannot be purchased easily when the customer is shopping through an intermediary, the airline has effectively lost part of its retail shelf.
NDC and the broader Offer & Order transition are part of the architecture required to close that gap, though neither automatically solves merchandising or ancillary distribution on its own. They create technical conditions that can support richer offers, but airlines still need the commercial, operational and distribution capabilities to make those offers available consistently. That is why the ancillary gap between carrier types is worth reading as a retailing maturity gap rather than simply a business-model difference.
Ultra-low-cost carriers such as Frontier built their commercial model around a la carte pricing from the beginning. Their economics demanded systems capable of selling seats, bags, priority services and other products as part of the shopping experience. Full-service and traditional carriers are approaching the same opportunity from a different starting point: much of their legacy infrastructure was designed around selling a fare and processing a ticket, rather than dynamically constructing and retailing a broader basket of products. The transition is therefore not simply about whether an airline has launched NDC. The more important question is how much of its distribution volume can actually consume the richer offer.
That creates an uncomfortable possibility for airlines reporting strong ancillary growth. A carrier can have excellent direct-channel conversion, impressive ancillary revenue per passenger and sophisticated retailing on its own website while still leaving significant value on the table across indirect channels. The Yearbook measures the outcome, telling us how much ancillary revenue airlines generated and how quickly it is growing. What it does not tell us is how much ancillary revenue the airline could have generated if every channel selling its tickets had the same ability to present, price and transact those products. That is the missing part of the story.
The industry’s next useful metric may not be ancillary revenue per passenger. It may be ancillary revenue capture by channel: how much of an airline’s ancillary proposition survives when the booking moves from its own website into a GDS, an NDC-enabled agency, an OTA or a TMC. No major industry yearbook publishes that figure yet. But the airlines that can answer it internally may have a significant advantage over those that only know their total ancillary revenue, because the next phase of ancillary growth will not be determined only by what airlines can sell. It will be determined by where they can sell it.
