siliconindia | | March 20179nities for airlines. It is an initiative to bring airline distribution technology up to date and deliver an environment to stimulate airline profitability.Whole focus of this initiative is to preserve interests on global airlines equity investors across industry. Few Indian carriers are classic examples of how value in this business has been depreciating for decades. Increase in the productivity of distribution chan-nels, strengthening net income and lowering operating costs of all air-lines will help this cause. With NDC, this will change. Now, end user will be able to buy all on-board facilities like meal, extra leg room, onboard entertainment and WIFI, along with ground facilities like priority boarding, free lounge, limo pick & drop, check-in seat, and others directly from travel agent's portal. All these offers will transpar-ently come directly from airlines, sav-ing huge intermediately cost, boosting their sales revenue and offering loads of rich content to end-users. This will empower travellers to compare all onboard and ground facil-ities before making the final choice. It is evident that all users are not same; some prefer comfort, some want val-ue for money, and rest may prefer best price. So if you are flying non-stop form Delhi to New York city, Wi-Fi either free or with small price tag will become mandatory. Or if you are fly-ing with infants or small kids, fresh baby food served at right temperature can't be justified with any price tag. Any parent will pay anything for that kind of service. This empowerment to showcase all your amenities will help airlines to invest and upgrade on fa-cilities and service level of their staff and aircrafts. With growing number of sales channels such as airline website, mo-bile app, social media, travel agents, Online Travel Agencies (OTA), call centre bookings, and desk bookings, it is highly important to identify the right customer. Emerging technolo-gies promise means to identify con-sumer even before the actual search begins. It allows airlines to project their offerings based on the perceived value and preference of an individu-al customer, in turn allowing them to evaluate multiple offerings based not just on a single parameter of price but also customer satisfaction. So in order to woo you as return-ing customer, you may get lot of com-plimentary upgrades, better wines and services on board. Other airlines may give you better fare pricing on same facilities and services to give you taste of his. So NDC will also open up competition and option to choose from bigger platter. All these of-fers and options will be dynamically pushed while you will be in process of making your choice on travel por-tal. So you will no longer regret after your booking that for $50 you missed to choose free upgrade or you were eligible for limo pickup but didn't ex-ercise that right.The strategy to adopt NDC will be critical for airlines. Early adopters of NDC can achieve faster ROI and reduce the impact of implementation. New merchandizing engine will pro-vide flexibility to deliver seats and of-fers using NDC standards. In a short time, this solution will allow airlines to achieve their business objectives for self-operated routes without sig-nificant investments. Today, there are more than 30 air-lines live or ready to be live on NDC. This number is expected to rise to 90 by 2020. By 2025, we at Airlines Technology expect that more than 70 percent airlines will either fully adopt NDC or have majority of business via NDC. Smriti Kumar
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