One airline, three prices
Lufthansa Group publishes a fee schedule that settles the argument. Under its Distribution Cost Charge guideline valid from 1 January 2026, a ticket issued in EDIFACT carries €18.00 through Amadeus, €22.50 through Sabre and €23.00 through Travelport. The same airline charges €8.00 on all three when the ticket is NDC sold through a GDS aggregator, and nothing when the agency holds a bilateral NDC contract. Same airline, and the price runs from €18.00 to €8.00 to zero. The variable is the standard the booking travels on and the contract behind it.
Through Amadeus alone, the price falls by more than half between the EDIFACT ticket and the NDC one. So when an agency owner hears that NDC is coming to replace the GDS, the airline’s own rulebook is telling a different story.
A GDS is a road, not a standard
A global distribution system such as Amadeus, Sabre or Travelport is a platform. It aggregates inventory, prices, books and tickets, and it sells that service to agencies. EDIFACT is the messaging standard, dating from the 1980s, that carried airline content through those platforms. NDC is the newer XML-based standard from IATA, launched in 2012, that lets airlines build and send their own offers.
The two standards can travel through the same platform. Amadeus told Business Travel Executive in October 2025 that the industry will live in a hybrid world where EDIFACT and NDC coexist. Sabre said much the same in 2023. Comparing a GDS with NDC is like comparing a highway with a vehicle specification. The honest contest is EDIFACT against NDC, with a second question stacked on top: does the offer reach you through an intermediary, or straight from the airline?
Who gains from the label
The confusion is more than an accident of vocabulary. It is commercially useful. Airlines label the charge a GDS surcharge, and agencies respond to the label. Lufthansa Group has said its charge is meant partly to cover traditional retailing and partly to push agents toward its NDC partner programme, and a group executive told Travel Market Report it is on track to handle 75% of bookings through NDC or direct channels. Turkish Airlines has raised its GDS EDIFACT surcharge twice, most recently from 1 May 2026, and exempts its own NDC platform, TKCONNECT. Kenya Airways charges €5.00 per segment on domestic routes and €10.00 on international routes for GDS bookings made outside its NDC-enabled channels, per the airline’s own distribution notice.
The TMC side has its own reasons to keep the fight framed as pipes. Consultant Norm Rose told Business Travel News in 2023 that NDC means “the reduction in GDS rebates for the TMC”, which he called the underlying blocker. Kyte chief executive Alice Ferrari has argued that NDC gave large airlines leverage to renegotiate their GDS contracts. A frame in which one side must win keeps everyone talking about technology while the argument about who controls the offer, and who pays for distribution, goes on underneath.
Where EDIFACT still does the work
NDC is growing, but it is not yet the default. It made up 21.6% of ARC-settled agency transactions in the United States in May 2026, ARC’s chief executive reported. That is US data only, and settlement volume is not the same as global share. In 2025, online travel agencies made 77% of those NDC transactions, leisure agencies 16% and corporate agencies 7%, according to Travel Weekly. NDC is largely an online-agency phenomenon so far.
The gap shows up after the sale. In a GBTA and Direct Travel survey of US and Canadian corporate travel managers in March 2025, only 13% said their booking tool supported self-service NDC changes. GBTA’s own report from the same research found that 54% said their TMC could not adequately support NDC or their tool lacked enough NDC content. These are buyers, not agencies, and they are North American.
Agencies describe the same friction in their own terms. Francesco Deluca of Omega World Travel says changes often cannot be made without calling the airline, and that some carriers run NDC helplines while others do not. Charlie Sultan of SAP Concur notes that interline and codeshare changes flow across a whole itinerary in the GDS, while under NDC the segments are often handled separately and can trigger several change notices for one journey. Nicola Ping of Flight Centre Travel Group offers the counterweight: airlines with order management handle disruption well, whichever channel serviced the booking. Lufthansa’s Puck Voorneveld says the group has invested more than €10 million in servicing over two years. The picture is uneven by airline, which is exactly why a single label for it misleads. All four spoke to Business Travel Executive in October 2025.
What the label costs emerging markets
The wrong mental model is dearer where budgets are thinner and itineraries are messier. In a 2025 survey by AFRAA and TPConnects, more than 40% of African airlines said they were planning or implementing NDC. The same survey has been reported with different figures for airlines lacking NDC capability, and its sample size has not been published, so treat its headline numbers with care. What is not disputed is that African airlines run at very different stages, and that agents must trade across all of them. In April 2026 TDN listed Ethiopian, Kenya Airways, RwandAir, EgyptAir and South African Airways as having different NDC maturity, aggregator partners, surcharges and servicing.
AFRAA’s secretary general, Abderahmane Berthé, told TDN that GDS charges for a Nairobi to Mombasa booking resemble those for Nairobi to London, and added, “The technology is not neutral.” Airlink’s chief commercial officer, Katherine Whelan, described agencies working a hybrid model, utilising NDC or GDS as the need fits. Even the people closest to the market reach for the two words as if they were alternatives.
Consider an illustrative agency in Nairobi. This is a composite built from published fee rules, not a reported case. It serves corporate clients flying Kenya Airways, Ethiopian and Lufthansa Group on one trip. If it reads the market as GDS versus NDC and picks a side, it either pays the EDIFACT charge on carriers that penalise it, or it abandons the channel that still handles interline changes most smoothly. Neither choice is forced. Both are made worse by the wrong question. No African agency has gone on record, in the research behind this piece, reporting a loss from this confusion. The case here is one of risk, not of documented damage.
Ask these instead
The useful questions are about standards, contracts and servicing, and an agency can put them to any airline or vendor this week. Which standard is this fare travelling on, and what does the airline charge on each path to reach it? What can I change, refund or exchange without calling the airline, and what does the rest cost me in agent hours? How does an interline or codeshare itinerary behave when one segment is disrupted? Who can service the booking after hours, and with whose credentials? And if I move a carrier’s volume to the cheaper path, what content or incentive do I lose in return?
None of these has a yes or no answer. Each has an answer that differs by airline, which is the point.
Price the lane, not the road
The key standards battle in airline distribution is between EDIFACT and NDC, and the GDS is the road both can travel on. Airlines decide which lane costs more, and they have been announcing their decisions in fee schedules for years. Lufthansa’s three prices for one ticket are the plainest proof that “NDC versus GDS” describes a marketing frame, not a market.
Agencies in emerging markets can least afford to choose a side on that frame. They serve itineraries that cross airlines at different stages, on budgets that cannot absorb a wrong switch. The better move is to stop asking which technology wins and to start asking who is pricing each lane, what it will cost to service a booking in it, and what the airline is trying to change. That is the question the “GDS versus NDC” label lets everyone skip.
