The V1 Airline Retailing Report

The V1 Airline Retailing Report

Episode 004 — "Invisible to Agents: The Infrastructure Debt Sabre Just Named Out Loud"

Published: Monday, May 25, 2026

Episode Description

The airline industry keeps talking about Offer and Order transformation. Only 27% have started. This episode explains why — and why the window to fix it is shorter than anyone is admitting.

This week on The V1 Airline Retailing Report, Eric and Steph connect three stories that aren't separate problems. They're three views of the same infrastructure debt — and together they set a deadline.

Research published in April 2025 quantified the Offer and Order execution gap in a way the industry is only now starting to reckon with. A joint study from Accelya and Atmosphere Research Group — drawing on 78 airline executives and 28 phone interviews — found that 72% of airlines identify O&O transformation as a priority. Only 27% have taken substantive steps to begin. That's a 45-point gap between aspiration and action. The report projects NDC bookings tripling to 21% of total volume within three years while EDIFACT GDS distribution declines by more than 57%. The realistic implementation window for most carriers: 2028 to 2029. Sabre's CEO said something this month from an earnings call that makes that data land differently than it did when it first published.

Sabre CEO Kurt Ekert used his company's strongest financial quarter in two years to publicly accuse Amadeus of monopolistic behavior in airline IT. The specific claim: Amadeus is using its control over the Altéa Passenger Service System to make it prohibitively difficult for airlines to implement competing Offer and Order solutions — trapping carriers inside a single technology ecosystem during the exact window when they need to modernize. Ekert said Sabre is pursuing regulatory and legal options. Amadeus responded not by rebutting the accusations but by announcing expansion into biometric identity, AI, hospitality, and payments. Eric and Steph break down what the non-response actually signals — and why the layers Amadeus is moving to capture are the same layers Google, Apple, and Anthropic are approaching from the consumer side.

OpenAI quietly removed its "Buy Now" button from ChatGPT in March 2026 — and the industry read it as a reprieve. It isn't. A January 2026 survey found 90% of U.S. leisure travelers are aware AI can help book travel, but only 2% are willing to let it book on their behalf. IDC nonetheless projects 30% of travel bookings will be executed by AI agents by 2030. The consumer trust gap is real. The structural timeline is also real. And the infrastructure that determines whether an airline's content is bookable by an agent in 2030 is the same infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt right now. Airlines that haven't started O&O transformation aren't running behind on a modernization roadmap. They're building toward a future in which they don't appear.

Stories Referenced in This Episode

Story 1 — The O&O Execution Gap
- Fewer than a third of airlines have started Offer & Order development despite recognizing revenue potential — Accelya / Atmosphere Research Group (April 2025)
- Fewer than 1 in 3 airlines have advanced offer and order strategies — PhocusWire

Story 2 — Sabre vs. Amadeus
- Sabre Claims Amadeus Blocks Competition in Airline Technology — Skift, May 7, 2026
- Amadeus Widens Its Travel Tech Domain as Sabre Fight Escalates — Skift, May 11, 2026
- Sabre Weighs Legal Maneuvers Against Amadeus Airline IT 'Dominance' — The Beat

Story 3 — Agentic AI Reality Check
- Agentic AI will redefine travel and hospitality in 2026 — IDC, January 2026
- Will Agentic AI Replace OTAs? The 2026 Reality Check — Gimmonix

The Bottom Line

The O&O execution gap, the PSS lock-in Sabre named publicly, and the agentic AI timeline are not three separate stories. They are one story about one problem with three faces. The infrastructure that determines whether an airline's content is machine-readable is the same infrastructure most airlines haven't started rebuilding — and the primary structural reason they haven't started is the same constraint Sabre's CEO just named on an earnings call. IDC's 30% by 2030 projection implies this transition starts now. Airlines that treat OpenAI's "Buy Now" pullback as permission to wait are misreading the signal entirely. The agents are ready. The content isn't. That's not a technology statement. It's a strategy statement.

Intro music: The perfect corporate podcast intro by Lundstroem. Licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Episode - 003 (May 13, 2026)

Ann Cederhall just published the most honest assessment of airline retailing in years — and the results will surprise you.

The State of Airline Retailing 2026 is a global survey of 213 aviation stakeholders conducted by the esteemed Ann Cederhall through LeapShift, sponsored by Retailaer. It benchmarks where the industry actually stands — not where the press releases say it stands. The survey highlights the progress the industry has made, and the specific friction points that remain, as we transition to modern retailing. We are making the full report available so you can benchmark your current progress against the rest of the industry. Eric and Steph go deep across three narratives the data surfaces.

Airlines are less confident in their own retailing than they were in 2023 — Despite three more years of NDC investment, ancillary tooling, and transformation programs, 41% of airline respondents rate their own retailing capabilities as poor or very poor. Airlines report feeling more confident in their peers than in themselves. With a 3.7% industry net margin and $120–150B in annual ancillary revenue at stake, the gap between ambition and execution is not a small problem.

NDC is losing the room — and ONE Order is quietly gaining it — Negative sentiment toward NDC and Modern Airline Retailing has grown since 2023, while optimism about ONE Order has increased. The more important finding is why: the industry has failed to explain the difference between an order-based PSS and an OMS, and that confusion is causing airlines to freeze. You do not have to replace your PSS to unlock order-based retailing. That misunderstanding is costing real money.

The biggest retailing opportunity in aviation is already inside every airline — Group travel, corporate direct purchasing, disruption moments, upgrades, and post-purchase touchpoints remain almost entirely untouched. Ann's conclusion is precise: the next wave of retail growth will not come from new products. It will come from retailing existing ones better — at the right moment, with the right offer, triggered by data airlines already have.

Report Referenced in This Episode

State of Airline Retailing 2026 — Ann Cederhall / LeapShift
- Download the full report — LeapShift, in collaboration with Airline Information, sponsored by Retailaer

The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

The airline distribution industry is running at three speeds simultaneously — and most people are only watching one of them.

This week on The V1 Airline Retailing Report, Eric and Steph break down three stories that look separate but tell one story about where distribution power is actually moving.

WestJet goes live with NDC this month — and they're calling it boring on purpose. After watching American, Lufthansa, and others turn their NDC rollouts into channel wars, WestJet held its launch until all three GDS connections were certified and ready. Agents get full channel optionality on day one. No coercion, no surcharge, no forced migration. It's the most deliberate NDC rollout in the industry's history — and it raises a sharper question: now that the pipe is ready, does WestJet have the offer logic to make it matter?

Travelport has a new CEO, fifty million dollars in fresh capital, and a partnership with United Airlines that doesn't look like any airline-GDS deal we've seen before. John Mangelaars — formerly CEO of Skyscanner — took the top job on April 1st, and the company is repositioning from legacy GDS to AI distribution infrastructure. The United deal goes further: co-development access to United's NDC technology roadmap, shared engineering resources, joint agency tooling. It's a structural relationship, not a content agreement. Eric and Steph break down why the model is right — and why execution is still the open question.

And then there's MCP. At the Airline Distribution 2026 conference, industry voices openly asked whether Anthropic's Model Context Protocol — barely eighteen months old — could make NDC obsolete before NDC reaches scale. Booking.com, Expedia, Turkish Airlines, Amadeus, and Sabre are all racing to publish MCP servers. Eric pushes back on the framing: MCP and NDC aren't competing — they operate at different layers of the stack. The real question underneath the debate is the one nobody wanted to close on: if AI agents become the primary booking interface, who controls the agent? It isn't airlines. It isn't GDSs. And that fight is already underway.

Stories Referenced in This Episode

Story 1 — WestJet NDC Launch

• "We've done our homework": Inside WestJet's "partner-first" NDC launch set for May 2026 — PAX News

• "It's the channel of your choice": WestJet prioritizes flexibility as it readies for mid-2026 NDC launch — Travelweek

Story 2 — Travelport Reinvention & United Partnership

• Travelport Enters Next Phase of Accelerated Growth as AI Reshapes Travel Distribution — PR Newswire

• Travelport and United Airlines Ink Long-Term Strategic Partnership — Travel Market Report

Story 3 — MCP vs. NDC

• MCP vs. NDC and other challenges facing airline distribution — PhocusWire

• AI, NDC and MCP: How the distribution of airline tickets is changing — Tragento

• MCP: Travel's Next Transformation Catalyst — Business Travel News

Episode 001 — Show Description & Notes

Episode Title: The Point of No Return: Airline Retailing's V1 Moment Has Arrived

Published: Monday, May 5, 2026

Episode Description

Welcome to the inaugural episode of The V1 Airline Retailing Report — the weekly podcast that cuts through the noise in airline and travel retailing and tells you what the headlines actually mean.

In aviation, V1 is the decision speed — the moment of no return on takeoff. Airline retailing has hit its own V1. The transformation is underway, the direction is set, and this week's stories make that crystal clear.

Co-hosts Eric Marketts and Steph Nell kick off the show with three stories that capture exactly where the industry stands right now: financial pressure on legacy distribution, the accelerating push toward Offer and Order modernization, and the AI wave that's about to reshape how airlines create and deliver personalized offers.

This Week's Stories

Story 1: Lufthansa Group Raises Its GDS Surcharge — Again Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Air Dolomiti raised their Distribution Cost Charge to $22 per ticket as of May 5th — and simultaneously pulled ITA Airways into the Lufthansa NDC ecosystem. With 75% of Lufthansa Group bookings now targeting NDC or direct channels, this is no longer a pilot program. It's a commercial strategy — and every major carrier is watching. Eric and Steph break down what this means for travel agencies, corporate travel programs, and the airlines still sitting on the fence.

📰 Lufthansa Group to Raise GDS Surcharge Again in May as ITA Joins NDC Fold — Travel Market Report

Story 2: Early 2026 Is Signaling a Major Shift Toward Offer and Order The conversation is shifting from NDC as a distribution pipe to Offer and Order as the actual commercial engine. Airlines that are moving now are reporting real yield improvements and ancillary growth — but the gap between strategy and execution remains enormous. PSS constraints, organizational inertia, and the sheer complexity of modernizing core reservations infrastructure mean that most carriers are further from delivery than their roadmaps suggest. Steph doesn't pull punches on this one.

📰 Early 2026 Signals a Major Shift in Airline Retail — PROS

Story 3: Agentic AI Is Coming for Airline Retailing — and It's Not Waiting AI-powered personalization is no longer a roadmap item for leading carriers — it's becoming the expected standard. Airlines are reporting 5–10% yield increases and double-digit ancillary attachment growth from better personalization in the corporate channel. But agentic AI — AI that doesn't just recommend, but actually creates and delivers dynamic offers in real time — requires something most airlines don't have: clean, unified, permissioned data. Eric and Steph unpack what the AI promise actually requires to deliver, and why the data work has to come first.

📰 Top Ancillary & Retailing Trends to Watch in 2026 — Future Travel Experience

📰 Agentic AI: The Next Leap in Airline Offer Creation — PROS