NDC and the ongoing transition to Offers & Orders were designed to modernize airline distribution - enabling richer products, personalized offers, and genuinely differentiated retailing. While adoption continues to advance across the industry, the ecosystem still depends heavily on brute-force shopping and price-first comparison. The infrastructure has been rebuilt. The discovery layer has not.
The promise of modern airline retailing was straightforward: move beyond the commodity fare and let airlines express the full value of their products. New distribution standards would allow carriers to describe seats, services, bundles, and ancillaries in structured, machine-readable ways, and enable sellers to present those products meaningfully to travelers. In practice, progress on the retailing side has been real. Progress on discovery has been far slower.
Product definitions remain fragmented across airline APIs. Every carrier structures its offer catalog differently. Attributes are named inconsistently, bundled in different ways, and exposed through APIs that vary in maturity and completeness. A seller integrating with multiple airlines must build and maintain separate normalization logic for each - a process that is expensive, brittle, and never fully complete.
The practical consequence is that sellers must guess which carriers can fulfill a given request, issue wide-ranging shopping calls across multiple sources, and reconcile the results themselves. There is no shared language for airline products. There is no structured layer that describes what an airline actually sells before a shopping query is made.
The outcome of this fragmentation is predictable. Integrations are duplicated across channels and platforms. Infrastructure costs are inflated by the volume of speculative shopping calls required to assemble a complete picture of what is available. And the traveler-facing experience still reduces airline value to a single dimension: fare level.
The industry has spent decades solving pricing infrastructure. The structured, semantic layer needed for product discovery - one that works across carriers, across channels, and ahead of the shopping call, has not been built yet.