When 600 airline technology professionals gather at Sancroft in the City of London from 21 to 23 September, the theme on the agenda, “The Journey to Value,” will sound like a natural next chapter for an industry that has spent the better part of a decade building Offer, Order, Settle and Deliver (OOSD). T2RLEngage is no longer asking airlines to justify the architecture. It is asking them to show what it is worth.
The gap the agenda names itself
The clearest example is not on the main stage. It is an airline-only workshop called “Interlining in the Age of OOSD: Barriers to Implementation.” T2RL’s own description says many airlines are progressing their OOSD strategies, but that the focus remains primarily on online traffic. Progress on interlining, it says, is “significantly slower.” The workshop, hosted by Jerry Foran and Gyorgyi Szantner, asks whether the reason is commercial value, technical complexity or a lack of standards.
A separate main-stage panel asks a version of the same question in front of the full room. “The Future of Airline Partnerships: Will OOSD Bring Airlines Closer Together?” questions whether the industry needs to go beyond current standards for interline, joint venture and intermodal collaboration to work. Two parts of the same programme, one closed to airlines only and one open to everyone, circling the same unresolved gap.
Who is being asked to answer
The speaker list gives that gap somewhere to land. American, Qantas, Alaska, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, flynas, SunExpress and Riyadh Air are all represented, spanning carriers with very different interline and alliance footprints. Riyadh Air, represented by Commercial Systems Programme Director Tim Catling, is the sharper case among them. The carrier only began full public commercial service on 1 July 2026, expanding to Dubai, Jeddah, Cairo and Mumbai within weeks, which puts it barely two months into scheduled operations by the time it takes the stage. Unlike the established carriers on the programme, Riyadh Air is not retrofitting a value story onto decades of legacy systems and existing distribution relationships. It is choosing which metrics count as success from a blank page. One of T2RL’s own podcast previews frames its session around exactly that question: how is success actually being measured.
Payments gets a more prominent hearing this year than it usually does at distribution-focused events. Kim Reynolds of Qantas and Keli Sandeman of Virgin Atlantic both hold payments-specific titles and are on the programme, and T2RL has built a half-day payments stream around them on the Tuesday. One of its own session descriptions states plainly that payments cannot be outsourced to generic providers or treated as “just plumbing,” and promises payment and settlement leaders will say what they wish their commercial colleagues understood about which decisions create hidden costs.
Two of T2RL’s own podcast previews go further than any panel description on the programme. One asks bluntly whether Delivery, after years of the industry’s attention going to Offer and Order, is “finally getting its moment,” and “what measurable value can we expect to see as a result.” Another, on Sabre embedding AI across its Mosaic platform, asks what new value airlines can expect and whether it has “been quantified.” Both questions could sit unchanged at the top of this piece.
The technical work behind the theme
The rest of the agenda is where the mechanics of that gap get worked through. “When Everything Is Modular: Designing a Balanced Approach to OOSD” takes on a problem every airline mid-transformation runs into: as OOSD architectures split into modular components from multiple vendors, who owns integration risk, and what does a workable vendor selection and management model look like when technology, commercial and organisational priorities pull in different directions. “Distribution Health Check: Assessing Multi-Channel Performance” asks which metrics airlines should actually be tracking once a distribution strategy is live, rather than treating launch as the finish line.
“Damage Control: Coping with the Unexpected Challenges of Transformation” names rising look-to-book ratios and the cost premium of modern retailing technology as risks airlines inherit once they own offer creation directly, alongside the possibility of agentic AI disrupting distribution channels before anyone has fully priced that risk in. “Intelligent Agents and the Future of Airline Commerce” asks what happens to OOSD, airline IT and distribution once AI agents become active participants in retailing rather than tools sitting behind it. The airline-only workshop on Continuous Dynamic Pricing sits alongside these, testing whether personalised bundling has moved past early pilots into something airlines can standardise on.
What would count as proof
T2RL says more than 200 airline delegates from 62 carriers attended in 2025, representing 47 percent of global passenger traffic. That gives the interlining and payments questions a large, specific audience to be answered in front of. What those delegates leave with this year is the real measure of the theme: a vendor management framework for modular OOSD, a working set of distribution health metrics, governance rules for where agentic AI is and is not allowed to act, a clearer read on whether Continuous Dynamic Pricing is ready to scale, and an actual number for what Delivery or Sabre’s AI investment is worth.
T2RL has already asked most of the hard questions in its own programme notes. Whether the sessions at Sancroft answer them, for the traffic that moves through an alliance partner or a travel agency and not just an airline’s own website, is what will separate “The Journey to Value” from a theme with the same name as the problem it was meant to solve.
