Airlines have long relied on the ticket to do more than carry a fare. It is the document agencies report and airlines settle against. In managed corporate programmes, the channel that issues it also shows an employer where travel spend goes. Direct booking can take corporate trips outside those channels, and orders-based retailing changes the record that settlement runs against. Neither makes settlement or corporate visibility less necessary. ARC’s latest announcements show where it intends to supply both: settlement for orders, and tracking for corporate travel booked directly with airlines.
Connex Orders began settling cash-paid orders earlier this year. Release 2, announced nine months later, extends reporting and settlement to debit, credit and charge cards and to orders with multiple forms of payment. According to ARC’s product page, ARC settles commissions and any cash portion, and commissions and fees on credit card orders settle weekly. The page also lists order changes, refunds and cancellations, near real-time status updates and fraud management among current capabilities. Cash is the simpler case. Cards raise harder questions about fraud and dispute exposure, and the system’s value to agencies will be judged on those details. ARC told agencies at launch that they keep the right to reject orders created in error or fraudulently. The airline now creates the record being settled, where an agency once issued the ticket it reported.
ARC presents Connex Orders as one of three parts of a portfolio, alongside Connex Legacy for GDS ticketing and Connex NDC, which covers both ticketed and orders-based NDC transactions. ARC says it will support orders, EDIFACT and NDC transactions in a hybrid environment. For airlines moving at different speeds across different channels, a single counterparty handling all three is the proposition’s strongest feature, because no airline will move every channel on one date.
Traverse addresses the other half of the problem. Embarq, Air Canada’s platform for Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises and non-profits, is free to join with no minimum spend. Enrolled businesses book on aircanada.com through Aeroplan accounts, select business travel, and have trips tracked in an Embarq portal. Air Canada says it built the platform with the consultancy ZS and Traverse, powered by ARC. Travel agencies cannot enrol or book on a business’s behalf, so the channel Traverse supports here sits outside the agency settlement ARC runs. The incentives are Air Canada’s own: discounts of up to 5 per cent on base fares on eligible routes and 1.5 times Aeroplan points on eligible Air Canada-operated bookings, both currently offered through 10 December unless extended.
ARC describes corporate forms of payment and the application of company travel policies to these bookings as future capabilities, and neither ARC nor Air Canada has given a timetable. Air Canada’s Embarq page, meanwhile, refers to booking options that align with a company’s travel policies without describing how that works today. The two statements may refer to different things, and neither source says precisely what is live. Traverse’s predecessor product was designed to bring corporate rates, payment methods and policies into airline booking sites. How much of that range Embarq will offer, and when, is not stated.
The strategy is not new. ARC took an equity stake in Traxo in 2019 to help travel managers see corporate travellers’ direct bookings. In January 2020 it took a majority stake in nuTravel, now Traverse, with its then chief executive Mike Premo arguing that travellers increasingly see direct and indirect channels as one. Traverse has been part of ARC since the start of 2026. The Air Canada work delivers a corporate strategy ARC has pursued for years, and Connex Orders is its settlement counterpart.
The evidence of commercial traction is thin. ARC has not named any airline using Connex Orders, and neither the product page nor the announcement gives volumes or a timetable for further releases. The page does not say how the card portion of an order is processed, whether debit and charge card orders settle on the same weekly cycle as credit card orders, or whether changes and refunds work identically on card-paid orders. ARC lists the airlines using Traverse but gives no Embarq enrolment figures. No commercial terms for ARC or Air Canada appear in the material reviewed, so what ARC earns from Embarq is unclear.
Both products are also tied to home markets, Connex Orders to ARC’s US agency settlement and Embarq to Canadian businesses. Nothing in the announcements addresses markets that settle through other arrangements. IATA publishes its own Settlement with Orders (SwO) process and messaging standard for clearing order-based sales. Its first schemas appeared in release 20.1, and release 21.3, the latest SwO implementation guide on IATA’s AIR Tech Zone, added clearance data structures and aligned the clearance flow for its two supported payment methods, Settlement Plan and EasyPay. ARC says its system is built on industry standards but has not said which. How closely the two align matters to any airline settling orders in more than one market.
The sequencing is sensible: cash first, then cards, with corporate visibility built in parallel. A roadmap is not adoption, though. The evidence that will count is a named airline settling orders through Connex Orders at meaningful volume, proof that changes and refunds on card-paid orders work without disputes between airlines and agencies, and delivery of the payment and policy functions promised for Embarq. The outcome is unlikely to be all or nothing. Airlines may route some orders through ARC while settling others elsewhere, and corporates may run direct programmes like Embarq alongside their existing tools. The real test is whether ARC becomes the default for transactions where an independent record between airline and agency matters most, or one supplier among several. That will show whether its role in orders is structural or optional.
