Finnair has become the first airline in the world to go live with Amadeus Nevio NDC, marking a shift from a PSS-based distribution model to one built natively on Offer and Order management.
The airline’s NDC touchpoint is now directly connected to Nevio’s Offer and Order system, rather than sitting on top of legacy PSS infrastructure. Amadeus describes this as the missing link that finally allows end-to-end retailing through NDC channels, rather than NDC operating as a parallel or bolted-on distribution layer.
For Finnair, the immediate change is product-level. The airline can now distribute bundled ancillary products through NDC channels for the first time, built in the Product Catalogue powered by Nevio. These bundles are launching first on Finnair’s own pilot platform, the Finnair Agency Sales Tool, before extending to other NDC-connected platforms and aggregators.
Surbhi Marwah, Finnair’s Vice President of Digital, Revenue and Retail, said the move builds on the carrier’s earlier position as the first airline to implement a fully IATA-compliant native Order. We note that Finnair’s NDC share has grown steadily in recent years, which the airline says gives it a foundation for dynamic pricing and further ancillary growth through indirect channels, mirroring gains already seen through its direct channels since launching its first bundles there.
Ghaleb Rostom, Amadeus’s Senior Vice President of Product Management for Airlines, framed the shift as giving airlines centralized control over Offers independent of sales channel, with a single Order holding the full customer journey. Amadeus says this should simplify post-booking changes, cancellations and servicing, while laying groundwork for future capabilities including ticketless, Order-based settlement and expanded seller management tools for onboarding and optimizing distribution partners.
Existing NDC connectivity is being maintained through the transition, which Amadeus says is designed to avoid disruption to current distribution partners while new capabilities are phased in.
Why it matters for the Second-Speed Market
Finnair’s move gives the industry its first live example of NDC running natively on an Offer and Order backbone rather than as an add-on to PSS. For markets still consolidating around PSS-level NDC adoption, including much of Africa and parts of MENA, this widens the gap between carriers operating on legacy architecture and those already retailing through Offer and Order models. It also sharpens the divergence point in the Three GDS narrative, with Amadeus now able to point to a live Order-based NDC deployment as its own distinct answer to where airline retailing is heading.
