Accelya and temoji consulting individually interviewed travel leaders at twenty of the world’s most recognizable corporate travel programs, including Apple, Amazon, Bechtel, Deloitte, Oracle, Parexel, Target, Salesforce, and Siemens, alongside TMC leaders from AmTrav and FCM and industry voices from Accenture, Navan, and ZS. The question behind the research was one the industry has been dancing around for years: after all the investment in NDC content, why does adoption still stall inside the world’s biggest travel buyers? The answer these buyers gave, independently of each other, was strikingly consistent. The barrier is no longer content. It is organizational readiness.
Adoption among the programs interviewed ranges from under 1 percent to 34 percent of air bookings, and 14 of the 20 reported that less than 10 percent of their current air bookings flow through modern airline retailing. Most of the biggest, best-resourced travel programs in the world are still in the early stages of a shift the industry has been describing as inevitable for years, and content exclusivity is starting to make that expensive. As more airlines move fares and ancillaries behind NDC channels, programs still in pilot mode risk losing access to the full commercial offer their competitors can already see.
Three numbers, three specific breaks
The research isolated three recurring readiness gaps, and the progression across them is the real finding here.
Eighteen of the 20 buyers named servicing, not content availability, as the single largest factor determining whether they can scale modern airline retailing further. Confidence in exchanges, refunds, unused ticket handling, and disruption management is still shaky enough that it holds back expansion even where airline content is technically available. Bechtel’s Dave Weaver framed the urgency bluntly: “the cost of waiting now exceeds the cost of testing and implementing.”
Sixteen of 20 said the pace of their own adoption depends less on their internal readiness than on the readiness of the airlines, TMCs, and booking technology providers around them, with the whole chain frequently moving at the speed of its least-ready partner. Accenture’s Jan Jacobsen put the stakes starkly: “if one partner fails, the whole thing fails.”
Fifteen of 20 said they cannot consistently measure the actual business value modern airline retailing is creating, even though they broadly agree the value extends well beyond airfare savings into traveler experience and operational efficiency. That is the most damaging number of the three. A travel manager who cannot measure value cannot build the internal business case to accelerate investment, which means the eighteen-of-twenty servicing problem and the sixteen-of-twenty ecosystem problem both stay unfunded even when everyone agrees they matter.
What the programs pulling ahead are doing about it
The gap between eighteen and fifteen is where the leading programs are actually operating. They are not waiting for perfect servicing or a fully mature ecosystem before moving. Salesforce, cited in the research as a case study, expanded modern airline retailing one airline at a time, prioritizing partners with existing operational readiness rather than waiting for the whole ecosystem to catch up simultaneously. Amazon closed its own measurement gap directly, comparing its modern airline retailing fares against comparable EDIFACT fares at the point of booking, giving its travel team a concrete way to quantify value rather than relying on adoption volume as a proxy for success.
Apple’s Stephen Olson described what buyers actually want from richer retailing content in a single line, a wish for content bundled specifically “for just those specific people who travel in my industry” rather than assembled piecemeal. Oracle’s Rita Visser offered an equally concrete picture of personalized offer construction, describing a scenario where a traveler with a long connection is offered a lounge pass priced directly into the fare rather than sold separately.
This is what closing the readiness gap looks like in practice: sequencing around the partners who are actually ready, and inventing your own measurement discipline rather than waiting for the industry to hand you one.
Where this leaves the rest of the industry
Accelya and temoji turned these findings into a structured self-assessment, the Modern Retailing Readiness Score, built around the same five areas the research surfaced: strategy, ecosystem, technology, operations, and performance. It is worth knowing the tool exists. It is not the point of this research. The point is the three numbers, and the fact that ninety-two percent of the buyers and industry members surveyed alongside the interviews believe modern airline retailing becomes the primary distribution model for managed travel within three years. That confidence is no longer a fringe view among corporate buyers. It is close to consensus.
What this research actually documents is that the fight over NDC has quietly moved. It is no longer about convincing buyers the technology matters. It is about servicing maturity, ecosystem coordination, and the unglamorous discipline of measuring value well enough to keep the investment going. Any travel program still treating its own NDC rollout as a technology checkbox, rather than as the operational and organizational transformation the buyers in this research describe, is solving the wrong problem.
