The airline industry is undergoing the most profound change in decades with the advent of the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA’s) New Distribution Capability (NDC) and the rise of Modern Airline Retailing (MAR). These innovations shift airline distribution from static, opaque processes to dynamic, personalized retailing powered by seamless Offer-Order-Settle-Deliver (OOSD) frameworks.

While airlines are re-designing how they sell, service and fulfill travel, maturity remains low. The transition requires an overhaul of processes and IT infrastructure across multiple stakeholders – including Online Travel Agencies (OTA) and Travel Management Companies (TMC) – necessitating dedicated teams to manage the OOSD lifecycle.

As of 2025, few airlines have fully operationalized these standards owing to legacy systems and integration hurdles. One study found that while 81 percent of airlines have launched live NDC channels, none have fully implemented an order management system and 60 percent have defined neither a strategy or nor a business case for orders.¹

The technology foundation exists, but the organizational readiness to operationalize it is still emerging. To expand beyond pilots, airlines need cross-functional Centers of Excellence (CoE) that can stabilize workflows, govern schema evolution and drive offer-order performance at scale.

MAR: The Opportunity and the Challenge

The commercial potential behind MAR is substantial. Analysts estimate that dynamic, personalized retailing and enriched product merchandising will unlock USD 45 Billion in airline revenues by 2030.² Another report notes that NDC-powered retailing could increase airline revenues by 3-5 percent annually, driven by improved conversion, richer ancillaries and expanded bundles.³

Early adopters will see tangible impact, including:

 

Growth in ancillary sales through dynamic product placement

Uplift in direct channel revenue through personalized offers

 

 

Reduction in servicing costs via automation and richer self-service flows

Higher OTA conversion rates due to visual merchandising and content-rich offers

 

More importantly, MAR enables airlines to operate as digital-first retailers rather than fare distributors, shifting from static filing to contextual offers shaped by passenger needs, loyalty signals and trip intent. However, this evolution also creates a more demanding operating environment where dynamic offer creation, order management and delivery, order accounting, product consistency across partners, seamless servicing and continuous data flows must all align.

The value is clear, yet capturing it requires an orchestration layer that many airlines do not currently have.

Tackling the Execution Gap

The biggest obstacle to MAR is not technology availability but the operational complexity behind it. Airlines quickly discover that scaling NDC and OOSD introduces a continuous cycle of schema updates, integrations, partner changes and servicing requirements that legacy teams are not designed to handle.

In practice, challenges surface in the following critical areas:

Build vs Co-create: The Case for Strategic Partnerships

While the need for a MAR CoE is clear, building this capability in-house is complex, costly and time-intensive. Multiple factors make a purely internal model difficult to sustain:

Because of these constraints, many airlines adopt hybrid operating models in which internal teams focus on strategy while external partners bring scale, operational depth and round-the-clock digital and domain expertise.

What Airlines Should Look for in a MAR Partner

As airlines evaluate collaborations for MAR capabilities, it is essential to look beyond cost considerations and assess the maturity, scale and domain depth of potential partners. Industry leaders typically demonstrate:

1. Deep Airline and Travel Domain Expertise

Partners with multi-decade experience in airline distribution, merchandising, customer servicing, revenue operations and revenue accounting bring critical insights into how NDC, ONE Order and OOSD standards behave in real-world environments. They also understand the nuances of airline settlement, interline, fare structures, irregular operations and areas where NDC failures often start.

2. Operations That Can Run Around the Clock

Modern retailing in the airline industry does not pause. Operational partners must offer:

• Multilingual, 24/7 monitoring
• Established incident management processes

• Robust disaster recovery frameworks
• Performance stability under peak load

Airlines cannot afford downtime during schema migrations, distributor changes or system updates.

3. Proven Technology and Integration Strength

Partners who have gone through complex integrations with major PSS, Global Distribution System (GDS), OTA and aggregator ecosystems can accelerate implementation timelines and avoid common pitfalls. In most live programs, the more experienced teams are the ones who:

• Deploy automation frameworks that reduce regression cycles
• Maintain compatibility across multiple schema versions

• Reduce post-launch defects through continuous testing and change governance

These are essential capabilities for largescale MAR operations.

4. Continuous Innovation and Standards Alignment

IATA’s standards keep evolving and partners need to move with them, not behind them. The ones who do this well have:

• Research teams that closely track global NDC / ONE Order changes
• A clear view of capability roadmaps aligned to industry trends

• A habit of early adoption of emerging servicing capabilities
• Benchmarking of best practices across airlines and travel intermediaries

This helps airlines stay ahead of disruptions instead of scrambling every time the ecosystem shifts.

5. Cross-Functional CoE Competencies

A mature partner does not show up with isolated skills. They bring a broader CoE model that ties the whole operation together. This covers areas such as:

• Automated regression and performance testing
• Real-time operational support
• Offer and order lifecycle management
• Schema migration planning

• Configuration governance
• Data management, mapping and quality assurance
• Root cause analysis across interconnected systems

Building this kind of depth is not impossible, but it does take time, investment and a fair amount of operational discipline.

The CoE as the Foundation of the Airline’s Retailing Future

Airlines can no longer delay the move to MAR. With industry estimates suggesting that up to 65 percent of indirect airline sales could be NDC-enabled by 2026, the distribution landscape is transforming fast.⁴ The leaders will be those who build the operational muscle to sustain dynamic retailing, not simply launch APIs or pilot new workflows.

A MAR CoE is the construct that enables these capabilities.

It brings together the continuous testing, lifecycle governance, configuration control, data stewardship and operational resilience needed to transform distribution into digital retailing.

As global airline commerce continues converging on real-time offer-order architectures, these CoEs will evolve from support functions into strategic business enablers – the operating system behind profitable, scalable and customer-centric airline retailing.

References

1. Can Airlines Accelerate the Transition to Modern Retailing?

2. Ready for takeoff: The airline retailing opportunity

3. Successful Airline Retailing Requires Industry Partnerships

4. The latest news and trends (2024-2025) in NDC distribution