For almost a decade, the airline industry has treated NDC and direct distribution as if they were the same strategy. They never were. NDC became shorthand for a bigger idea, the airline talking to the traveller with nothing standing in between, but the pitch conflated a data standard with a sales channel from the start.
The data now emerging suggests that conflation was not just imprecise. It was strategically backwards.
NDC is a data standard, not a channel. It is an XML based messaging format built by IATA to replace the decades-old EDIFACT protocol that GDSs run on, allowing airlines to transmit branded fares, ancillaries, and dynamic pricing as structured offers rather than flat fare codes. Direct distribution is a separate concept entirely: it describes who the airline is selling to, not what format the offer takes. An airline can run a legacy EDIFACT booking engine on its own website and be fully direct with zero NDC. It can equally run NDC content through a travel agent, an OTA, or a GDS and remain fully indirect. The two ideas sit on different axes. They were never the same thing, even though the industry has spent years talking as if they were.
What is changing is which axis is actually moving.
Accelya, whose FLX NDC platform processes a significant share of global NDC volume, reported that corporate NDC bookings grew 168 percent year on year in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. The same dataset showed NDC volume distributed specifically through GDS channels grew 162 percent over the same period, tracking corporate NDC growth almost one for one. If NDC were primarily succeeding because airlines were pulling bookings away from intermediaries, GDS-carried NDC growth should have lagged behind overall corporate NDC growth. Instead, the two are expanding at almost identical rates. NDC content is increasingly reaching travellers through the exact intermediaries it was originally framed to displace.
The commercial incentive behind this is straightforward. Lufthansa Group, which pioneered GDS distribution surcharges in 2015, raised its Distribution Cost Charge again effective January 2026, with rates as high as EUR 23.00 per ticket for Travelport bookings, and raised the charge a second time in May. Surcharges of this kind are not designed to push travellers toward an airline’s own website. They are designed to push agencies toward NDC connectivity, wherever that connectivity happens to live, GDS aggregation layers included. Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport have each built NDC aggregation capability precisely so they can keep carrying this content rather than lose the booking entirely. The surcharge model rewards NDC adoption. It does not require the booking to go direct.
This matters because it inverts the argument that has justified years of airline capital investment. The case for owned-channel spend, better booking engines, app development, loyalty-linked direct offers, has rested partly on the premise that direct was the only place richer content could live. If NDC aggregators and GDS NDC layers can deliver comparable branded fares, ancillaries, and dynamic pricing through indirect channels, that premise weakens. The content advantage that was supposed to belong to direct increasingly belongs to whichever channel has NDC connectivity, direct or not.
None of this means GDSs have won the underlying fight. Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport are not returning to their pre-NDC commercial position; they are adapting to survive inside a standard that was built, in part, to reduce their leverage. And the incentive structure cuts against a symmetrical outcome. Airlines that have already sunk capital into direct-channel infrastructure have reason to keep pointing to it as the differentiated experience even as NDC content parity narrows the gap. GDSs, for their part, have every reason to publicise their NDC aggregation capability as proof that indirect remains viable. Neither side is a neutral narrator here, and the piece should be read with that in mind.
One caution on the numbers themselves. NDC adoption is a moving target, and figures published by IATA and industry trackers are typically anchored to a specific reporting date rather than representing a stable state. The 168 percent and 162 percent figures cited above are Accelya’s own platform data for Q4 2025 versus Q4 2024, not an industry-wide census, and should be read as evidence of direction rather than a definitive market share claim. Wider figures circulating this year, that NDC represented approximately 24 percent of indirect global ticket sales in early 2026, up from 11 percent in 2023, trace back to IATA reporting rather than independent confirmation and are included here as context rather than as a standalone data point.
The practical conclusion for anyone still treating “NDC” and “going direct” as synonyms: they were never the same question, and the market is now answering them differently. Direct distribution may still matter for loyalty, merchandising, and customer ownership. But NDC’s success no longer depends on airlines selling directly. The market is increasingly rewarding NDC connectivity wherever it exists.
