The pitch decks all look the same. Faster integration, broader content, cleaner servicing. What differs, once an aggregator is actually sitting in front of a travel management company’s procurement team, is which of those claims the TMC can afford to believe, and in what order.
NDC has stopped being a pilot. Global indirect ticket sales through NDC channels reached roughly 24 percent in the first quarter of 2026, up from 11 percent in 2023, and Accelya reported corporate NDC bookings up 168 percent year on year in the fourth quarter of 2025, with GDS-distributed NDC volumes up 162 percent over the same period. Europe leads at 31 percent NDC penetration of indirect sales, ahead of North America. IATA’s Airline Retailing Maturity Index, which replaced the old four-level certification system in 2022, has now validated more than 70 airlines. The technology argument is largely settled. What remains contested is the commercial and operational logic a TMC has to work through before it picks who sits between it and that airline content.
The Override Question Sets the Ceiling
Before a TMC evaluates a single feature, it runs the numbers on what it stands to lose. Under the legacy GDS model, airlines pay distribution fees to GDS operators, who share a portion back to agencies as override commission. Move volume onto NDC and, in the agency model, that override structure typically doesn’t follow. Sarosh Waghmar, co-founder of the corporate travel platform Spotnana, has pointed to this directly: agencies worry that content consumed outside the GDS costs them the GDS payment that has underwritten their economics for years.
Airlines have started responding to this with real money rather than reassurance. American Airlines offers a 10 percent commission on certain NDC packages sold directly or through an aggregator, commission that would not exist on the same booking through GDS. Air Canada has run per-segment coupon incentives for NDC and certified-partner bookings. Accelya’s own data shows why airlines are willing to pay for this shift: ancillary attachment rates that run 5 to 8 percent on EDIFACT bookings can reach 35 percent on NDC, according to Barbara Moreno, the company’s director of product marketing. An aggregator that cannot show a TMC where its replacement revenue actually comes from, whether that is airline-funded incentives, a service fee model, or a profit-sharing arrangement, does not get past this stage regardless of what the platform can do.
Integration Speed Is Not a Feature, It Is a Prerequisite
Direct airline-by-airline NDC integration commonly takes three to six months per carrier and assumes an IT team most mid-sized agencies do not have spare capacity to deploy. This is the structural reason aggregators exist at all: one integration to an aggregator’s platform can open live NDC content across multiple carriers in weeks, not months. For an agency trying to maintain servicing quality across five or six airlines that have each built their own version of the NDC standard, because IATA’s standard has not stopped individual airlines from customising their implementation, that single integration point is not a convenience. It is the only way the workload stays manageable.
Content Still Wins Deals
Before any of the above gets weighed, most agencies ask a simpler question first: which airlines can they actually reach through this platform. Not every aggregator carries the same relationships. Some have deeper European coverage, some specialise in low-cost carriers, some are preferred partners for Middle Eastern airlines, some hold exclusive or early-mover integrations that others do not. No amount of servicing excellence compensates for missing airline content. Procurement teams compare not just how many airlines an aggregator connects to, but whether those airlines carry meaningful volume within the agency’s own customer base. An aggregator with fifty connections offers little advantage if an agency’s largest corporate clients fly carriers that are absent or only partially implemented on that platform. Breadth matters, but relevance to the agency’s actual booking mix matters more.
Where the Settlement Question Actually Bites
This is the part of aggregator evaluation that looks different depending on where the agency sits. Global BSP settlement processed 232.8 billion dollars in ticket sales in 2024 across more than 207 countries and territories, with a 100 percent on-time settlement rate, and most agencies, including most in Africa and other emerging markets, still route through it because nothing else offers that reliability. But BSP settlement assumes an agency model, where the agent is the merchant of record and remits to the airline on a consolidated cycle. Some NDC implementations push agencies toward a merchant model instead, where the airline becomes merchant of record and the agent effectively becomes a referral channel paid separately. That is a fundamentally different cash flow position for an agency that has built its working capital around BSP’s settlement rhythm, and it matters more in markets where credit lines are thin and card processing infrastructure is uneven than it does for a well-capitalised TMC in Western Europe. An aggregator that has not built a clear answer to which settlement model its NDC flow actually uses, and what that means for an agency’s cash position, is asking that agency to absorb a treasury question it did not sign up for.
Servicing Decides Renewal, Not the Pitch
Many aggregators win the pilot because the integration works. They lose the renewal because servicing breaks once it hits production volume. Procurement teams increasingly speak to existing customers rather than relying on a demonstration environment, which means the evaluation extends past go-live into evidence that refunds, exchanges and schedule changes keep performing months later, not just in the first weeks when everyone is paying close attention. Thane Jackson, BCD Travel’s senior vice president of supplier management and delivery, put it plainly after his company’s own NDC volume data came in: corporate buyers want NDC solutions that work reliably at scale, with full servicing and minimal disruption to existing workflows. That bar has also risen. Travel managers now ask about unused ticket management, disruption handling, duty of care integration and traveler profile synchronisation alongside basic ticketing, not as extras but as procurement questions in their own right. Kenya Airways, which went live on NDC through Verteil, instructs agents to check with the aggregator first on technical issues before escalating to the airline’s own NDC helpdesk, precisely because the aggregator is meant to absorb that first layer of complexity. Whether an aggregator can actually hold that promise across refunds, exchanges and post-ticketing changes, consistently and across multiple airlines, is what a TMC finds out in month four, not in the sales meeting.
The Order Nobody States Out Loud
None of these four questions gets asked in isolation, and none of them is fixed. A TMC with strong balance sheet flexibility can absorb override loss that would sink a smaller agency, which changes how much weight the commercial question carries relative to servicing quality. An agency with an in-house integration team can tolerate a slower aggregator onboarding that a leaner competitor cannot. What holds across markets is the sequence: content relevance sets the shortlist, commercial viability has to clear next because nothing else matters if the economics do not work, integration burden and settlement compatibility follow wherever BSP dependency runs deep, and servicing quality sits last in the evaluation but first in determining whether the relationship survives past its second year.
The irony is that the aggregator itself is becoming less of the differentiator. As more providers reach comparable levels of airline connectivity and technical maturity, procurement decisions increasingly turn on economics, operational resilience and servicing execution rather than access alone. The winning aggregator is rarely the one with the longest airline list. It is the one that creates the fewest operational surprises after deployment.
Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, NDC, GDS dynamics, and travel payments with a focus on Africa and emerging markets.
