The conversation has shifted. At the 2026 Air Retailing Partner Circle in Frankfurt, nobody was debating whether NDC had a future. The question on the table was how fast the industry could scale it.
Lufthansa Group brought together around 100 executives, technology partners, and travel agency decision makers at Hotel Scandic in Frankfurt on April 29 and 30 for the 2026 edition of its annual Air Retailing Partner Circle, a closed-door gathering that has quietly become one of the more substantive forums in European airline distribution.
The event, co-hosted with Accelya, marked a notable moment in the Group’s NDC program: a public ceremony recognising NDC Connectivity Program partners at tiered levels, with TPConnects and AirGateway receiving Premium Partner status and Verteil attending as a Premier Partner. The on-stage badge presentations underscored how deliberately Lufthansa Group is structuring its NDC ecosystem, not just as a technical program but as a commercial relationship framework.
Accelya’s Tye Radcliffe and Lufthansa Group’s Puck Voorneveld, Senior Director of Distribution and Payment Transformation, took the stage together to address how the retailing technology is being built out in practice. Heinrich Lange, Vice President Digital Retailing at Lufthansa Group, and Natalia Zakharova and Anton Lutz rounded out the organising team.
From debate to execution
The thematic shift at this year’s event was stark. TPConnects, which represented the company through Senior Strategic Account Manager Sonia Cardoso and Product Manager Kateryna Volkovinska, noted that the central question had moved from “what is the value of NDC?” to “how do we increase adoption?” That transition, from justification to operationalisation, reflects a broader maturation across the European distribution landscape, where NDC is no longer a proposition being sold to sceptics but a program being scaled with committed partners.
Discussions at the event ranged beyond core NDC connectivity into automated servicing workflows, versioning, new offer concepts, rich-content retailing interfaces, and payments. AI use cases and Order Management were also on the agenda, pointing toward the next phase of what Lufthansa Group and its peers are calling Modern Airline Retailing, a framework that goes well beyond NDC to encompass the full offer-and-order architecture envisioned under IATA’s modernisation roadmap.
One milestone noted publicly by Accelya’s Giuseppe Caputo, Director of Key Account Management, was the beginning of ITA Airways’ NDC journey. The Italian carrier, in which Lufthansa Group acquired a 41 percent stake in early 2025 and is now integrating into the Group’s commercial structure, is being folded into the Group’s broader retailing framework, a signal that the LHG NDC program is expanding to cover its newest airline asset.
The event also coincided with Lufthansa’s centenary, weaving a sense of institutional occasion into the proceedings.
What the partner tier structure signals
The formalisation of partner tiers, Premier and Premium, is not simply a recognition exercise. It reflects a broader industry shift away from open-access distribution models toward curated retailing ecosystems where technical depth, servicing capability, and commercial alignment increasingly determine market access. For technology vendors, achieving a named tier within the LHG NDC Connectivity Program carries real commercial weight: it signals to travel agencies and corporate buyers that a given platform has passed Lufthansa Group’s technical and commercial bar.
For the three vendors recognised in Frankfurt, the implications are meaningful. AirGateway, which has described itself as having been deep in the NDC ecosystem for some time, framed the badge as confirmation of its position at the forefront of the NDC transition alongside one of Europe’s leading carriers. TPConnects, which has built its proposition around NDC connectivity across multiple airlines, used the moment to signal its alignment with the LHG roadmap on servicing, payments and offer innovation. Verteil, whose co-founder and CPO Satheesh Satchit represented the company in Frankfurt, attended as a Premier Partner, the higher of the two public tiers referenced across posts from the event.
The presence of Accelya as co-host adds a further layer of significance. Accelya is one of the central technology providers underpinning Lufthansa Group’s modern retailing infrastructure, and its joint hosting of the event positions it not merely as a vendor but as a strategic collaborator in how LHG engages its partner ecosystem. That positioning matters as airlines consolidate their retailing technology relationships around fewer, deeper partnerships.
A forum worth watching
The Air Retailing Partner Circle has run for at least three consecutive years, moving from the Lufthansa Innovation Hub in Berlin in 2024 to the Flying Lab in Frankfurt in 2025 and back to Frankfurt, this time at Hotel Scandic, in 2026. It has grown from a single-day gathering to a two-day format, and the introduction of a formal partner recognition program suggests it is becoming a more structured feature of Lufthansa Group’s partner engagement calendar.
For travel technology companies active in NDC, the event is effectively Lufthansa Group’s annual partner summit. For the agencies and decision makers in the room, it offers a direct line into where one of Europe’s largest airline groups is taking its distribution strategy, and with whom it intends to get there. As airline retailing moves from standards discussions into ecosystem consolidation, forums like the Partner Circle are becoming less about visibility and more about positioning.
Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, NDC, GDS dynamics, travel payments, and travel technology with a focus on Africa and emerging markets.
