Airline pricing can accelerate adoption, but TDN’s review of public evidence finds far more proof that NDC works technically than that agencies earn more from it.
Every NDC provider’s pitch to a travel agency carries an unspoken request: take on the cost of change now, and trust that the economics will follow. The technical case has largely been made: Sabre said it ended 2025 with 42 live NDC carrier integrations. But connectivity is what an airline needs from a distributor. What an agency needs is a better margin, and the public evidence suggests the industry has proved the first far better than the second.
The numbers that exist describe volume, not value. ARC reported that NDC made up 21.2 percent of the US agency transactions it settled in July 2026, with 1,186 agencies reporting NDC activity. That is substantial, yet the May 2026 figure of 21.6 percent was barely above the 21.4 percent recorded a year earlier. Sabre put NDC at about 5 percent of its distribution volume in the second quarter. These series measure different things, and they share a blind spot: none says whether the agencies counted earn more per booking than before.
What an agency is actually giving up
A mature GDS desktop is an operating environment as much as a booking tool. Queues, negotiated fares, exchange and refund logic, mid-office hooks and quality-control routines all hang off the record it produces. Business Travel News reported in 2023 that after American pulled content from EDIFACT, TMCs found that re-shopping and fare-monitoring tools could not follow NDC bookings. AmTrav’s Jeff Klee argued in the same piece that the fault lay with TMCs’ PNR-centred stacks rather than with NDC. Either way, dependency varies. A leisure agency issuing point-to-point tickets faces a different decision from a TMC whose policy engine and duty-of-care tooling are built around the GDS record.
It also matters which switch is on the table. Adding NDC inside an existing GDS workflow, adding an aggregator beside it, and connecting directly to airlines are three separate decisions with different costs and failure modes. Verteil describes its model as a full replacement for the GDS model, which is positioning, not an observed outcome.
Where the value goes
The airline’s gain is easy to state: control of the offer, continuous pricing, bundles and lower distribution cost. The GDS position is documented as well. On its second-quarter call Sabre’s chief executive said NDC economics are slightly dilutive to revenue and margins outside Europe, and more materially so in Europe, where traditional booking fees are higher. That is evidence about the GDS’s own unit economics, not proof that agencies lose money on NDC. Aggregators earn through subscriptions or transaction fees, as with TPConnects’ per-passenger fee model in a 2019 Oman Air partnership. The airline’s gain, the GDS’s margin shift and the aggregator’s fee are all visible in the structure. The agency’s gain is the one that has to be demonstrated.
The strongest evidence of agency benefit is fare savings. Navan’s NDC Savings Index, presented with Air France in November 2024, compared NDC and EDIFACT prices booking by booking across 12 airlines over three months and reported average savings of 3.3 to 16.6 percent, with 7.6 percent on Air France. That is a TMC’s own analysis, reported without a stated sample size, and the saving goes to the buyer. It becomes agency revenue only if the agency’s fee tracks fare value, or if the saving wins and keeps the account. Consultant Norm Rose told BTN in 2023 that the real obstacle for large TMCs was the loss of GDS rebates under NDC, a view that makes incentives as important as workflow.
What the surcharge does and does not prove
The best-documented agency-level cost TDN found is the cost of staying put. Air France’s leisure agencies pay €24 per direction on EDIFACT tickets, a rate the airline said in late 2025 would stay in place for 2026. TDN has not re-verified it since. For business agencies the picture is softer. In May 2026 Air France’s chief executive extended the interim €4 EDIFACT surcharge to 31 December 2026, replacing a planned step to €24 on 1 July. The airline has postponed that step repeatedly, which suggests it adjusts the price signal to the pace of adoption. Its own figures put business-segment NDC penetration at 26 percent in October 2025 and, by May 2026, about one-third, up 15 points on a year earlier, with some agencies above 80 percent. A price signal like this plainly accelerates adoption, and it is a legitimate reason to adopt. One airline’s pricing does not establish that surcharges explain adoption across the market, and it is not a platform proving its worth.
It is also a fragile foundation. Travelport’s July 2026 agreement with Turkish Airlines promises agencies a reduced surcharge for NDC, not an absent one. A provider whose main argument is surcharge avoidance is selling a differential that airlines can reprice.
After the ticket
Post-booking is where the economics are decided and where public evidence is thinnest. The most detailed account TDN found is from May 2023, when BTN reported TMC agents spending two to three hours on the phone with American to change NDC tickets for disrupted travellers, while AmTrav said 60 to 70 percent of its servicing requests could be automated. The available evidence shows that servicing capabilities have developed, but remain carrier- and implementation-specific. Sabre’s Qatar Airways page shows capability arriving in stages, with voluntary exchanges first added for single-adult orders in August 2023. Travelport’s documentation states that NDC voids, exchanges and refunds run through separate APIs from GDS content, and that capabilities differ by carrier. Air France says its after-sales coverage now matches EDIFACT, though some functions may not yet be active in online booking tools.
Hard outcome data are scarce. The only handling-time figure TDN located, a 30 percent reduction attributed to an eTraveli report, reached print through an Accelya executive, and TDN could not find the underlying report. Treat it as a vendor-relayed claim.
Airlines also police agency search behaviour. Qantas sets a maximum look-to-book ratio of 2,500 to 1 and applies limits to agencies that exceed it, so an agency comparing offers across several sources has to manage traffic as well as content. TDN found no provider publishing migration support terms, servicing service levels or agency-level return figures.
What the arithmetic might look like
These scenarios do not estimate the typical return from NDC adoption. They show how the same technology can produce different agency economics depending on who bears distribution charges, who retains the savings, what incentives disappear, and how much servicing costs. No provider publishes agency-level return, so every input below except the Air France leisure surcharge is an assumption invented for illustration. The models also exclude any extra agency revenue from commissions, incentives, fees or retained accounts, and any gains from better content or lower booking costs.
Take a leisure agency issuing 10,000 return tickets a year, all assumed to qualify for Air France’s €24 per direction EDIFACT surcharge. Assume it absorbs half of the €48 round-trip charge under the legacy model, so avoiding it is worth €24 a ticket, or €240,000. That figure is a scenario assumption, not a universal agency saving. Assume a €3 aggregator fee per ticket (€30,000), servicing on 8 percent of tickets taking 13 extra agent minutes at €30 an hour (€5,200), and €40,000 of integration over three years (€13,333 a year). The net is about €191,000 a year, close to €19 a ticket, and the surcharge is doing the work.
Now take a corporate agency issuing the same 10,000 tickets, where the surcharge is passed to the client (and, for business agencies on Air France’s transition terms, is currently €4, not €24). The negative result depends entirely on the assumed incentive loss and servicing costs. Neither is a verified market average, and the scenario is not a forecast of typical corporate agency economics. Assume the same €3 fee (€30,000), lost GDS incentive income of €4 a ticket (€40,000), servicing on 25 percent of tickets taking 20 extra minutes (€25,000), and €100,000 of integration over three years (€33,333 a year). The agency is about €128,000 a year worse off, roughly €13 a ticket, before any client-side saving. Gross booking value appears in neither calculation, because it is not the agency’s revenue.
What providers must prove
None of this says agencies should stay put, or that NDC is failing. Air France reports about half of bookings from French agencies going through NDC, and where a surcharge is large and servicing is light, the case can be strong. The point is narrower: the evidence TDN reviewed shows strong airline price signals, particularly in parts of Europe, and far less proof from providers that agencies come out ahead. Where the client keeps the savings and the agency carries the servicing, reluctance can be rational rather than conservative.
The likeliest future is hybrid and segmented. GDS companies keep the workflow role for as long as NDC offers appear in the screens and records agencies already run, which is what Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport say they are building. Aggregators win where they remove a cost the GDS cannot, such as access to carriers outside GDS programmes. The provider that prevails will not be the one with the most carriers connected. It will be the one that can show an agency, in the agency’s own currency, what it earns.
That means publishing what is absent: the share of exchanges and refunds automated per carrier, median agent minutes per servicing event, the all-in fee schedule, contractual service levels, and before-and-after margin per ticket from a named agency pilot. One more measure matters as much: the proportion of bookings that can be serviced end to end without leaving the agency’s normal workflow. A provider may support exchanges in theory while the agency’s booking tool or mid-office still sends agents to another channel. The evidence should also be split by agency type, since a leisure agency facing a large surcharge has a different investment case from a TMC that passes the charge to its client but loses GDS incentives.
For African agencies the questions are open and need market-specific evidence. TDN has not established whether carrier coverage, settlement arrangements, connectivity costs or supplier incentives make NDC more or less profitable there, and the answer may differ by market and agency type. Providers could start by publishing results from African pilots. Until providers publish such evidence, agencies are entitled to ask what happens to the pitch when an airline’s surcharge schedule changes.
Sources and evidence notes
Evidence class is marked as documented (primary data or filings), vendor claim, or reporter or consultant analysis. All links were retrieved on 14 October 2026.
- ARC, US agency NDC share: July 2026 release, 20 August 2026; May 2026 release, 18 June 2026. Documented, US agencies only.
- Sabre, Q2 2026 call highlights, August 2026 and Q4 2025 call summary, February 2026. Management statements on earnings calls, secondary summaries.
- Business Travel News, TMCs Wrestle with New NDC Reality, 23 May 2023. Reporter analysis with named executives. Dated.
- TourMaG, Navan NDC Savings Index and Air France workshop, 7 November 2024. TMC-run analysis, methodology not published.
- Déplacements Pros, Air France extends €4 surcharge, 4 May 2026 and Air France delays GDS surcharge, 18 November 2025; L’Echo touristique, Air France revises 2026 surcharge calendar, November 2025. Airline executive interviews.
- Travelport, Turkish Airlines distribution agreement, 10 July 2026; Travelport, NDC guide for developers. Press release and documentation, vendor-authored.
- Sabre, Qatar Airways NDC page (servicing status as of August 2023). Vendor-authored.
- The Business Travel Magazine, NDC: Busting the myths. Executive commentary, including the secondhand eTraveli figure.
- Qantas, NDC shopping policy. Airline policy document.
- Aggregators: TPConnects and Oman Air, 2019; Verteil implementation announcement. Vendor or trade announcements, dated as stated.
What this analysis cannot show. TDN found no independent, published measurement of agency handling time, servicing cost or net margin change after NDC adoption. Air France’s €24 leisure-agency surcharge was last confirmed from late-2025 reporting, and the airline’s May 2026 announcement keeps its business-agency rate at €4 until 31 December 2026. The two financial models are illustrations built on stated assumptions, not findings.
