Terrapinn’s flagship airline technology event opens in Lisbon on Tuesday, with its retailing and payments programme exposing the unresolved questions behind the industry’s distribution transformation.
The programme for World Aviation Festival suggests that the industry’s offer and order ambitions will be tested at the checkout. The event opens at FIL in Lisbon on Tuesday 13 October and runs to 15 October, its first edition away from ExCeL London. Organisers expect around 4,500 attendees, 600 speakers and 400 exhibitors across sixteen tracks. Artificial intelligence runs through the agenda and will attract most of the coverage. For readers who follow distribution, the more revealing material sits in the retailing and payments tracks, where unresolved questions about who controls the sale, and who settles it, are put on stage.
The clearest signal is a panel title. “The 2027 roadmap for 100% Offers & Orders: Pipe dream or paradigm shift?” brings together TAP Air Portugal, IATA, IAG, Alaska Airlines and two technology vendors on Tuesday, with analyst Henry Harteveldt moderating. The debate over whether airlines adopt NDC has largely given way to a harder question, which is whether a full move to offers and orders can be delivered by a fixed date. The session is partly vendor-led, as are many across the programme. Wednesday’s roundtables on funding the move to Offer and Order, and on product catalogs as the base for retailing at scale, point at the same friction.
Payments is where the programme turns practical. A Tuesday midday panel asks who controls checkout and payment steering once AI agents begin shopping for travellers, which is really a question about who owns the customer. A fireside chat with Kenya Airways’ Dennis Lore covers payment reconciliation in the age of Offer and Order. Reconciliation rarely makes headlines, yet it is where an airline moving away from ticket-based settlement finds out what the change costs. Other sessions cover orchestration, approval rates, and alternatives to cards such as account-to-account transfers, wallets and buy now, pay later. Airlines share these stages with a long list of payment providers, and several sessions are provider-led.
On distribution, the programme shows airline implementers, retailing technology companies and IATA, plus workshops on NDC results and the transition to Order, one of them open only to airline and airport staff. In the parts of the published programme and speaker list we reviewed, we could not find anyone from Sabre or Travelport, and Amadeus appears through its ventures arm rather than its distribution business. Any of them may still take part in sessions or on the exhibition floor, and the list is not final, so whether the global distribution systems appear elsewhere in the programme is worth watching.
Emerging markets are represented unevenly. The Gulf has the deepest bench, with Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways, Saudia, Gulf Air and Oman Air all on the list. Latin America is well covered through LATAM, Abra, Avianca, Copa and Aeromexico. Africa is thinner. Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, Air Cairo and EgyptAir send specialists in payments, innovation and customer experience, and the African Airlines Association and Nigeria’s Federal Airports Authority are listed, but the list shows no African airline chief executive. Wednesday’s keynote CEO panel, on geopolitical instability, features the heads of TAP, Abra and LATAM and no chief executive from an African or Gulf carrier.
For airlines in Africa, the practical question is not whether offers and orders arrive but what it costs to settle them. Reconciliation, payment acceptance and orchestration can be expensive to implement, and many of the airlines and providers on these stages operate at a scale that absorbs that cost. Kenya Airways’ session on Tuesday at 13:35 is one of the clearer chances to hear an African carrier describe the work on its own terms. Whether the cost is treated as an airline problem to be solved or a provider product to be sold will show who the new retailing model is being built for.
