Airline Retailing Architecture Blueprint

This blueprint outlines a practical architecture for NDC-enabled airline retailing.

1. Integration Layer
- Connect to airline NDC APIs, aggregators, payment providers, identity systems, and back-office systems.
- Isolate airline-specific schema and workflow variations behind adapters.
- Use clear request tracing across shopping, pricing, booking, payment, ticketing, and servicing.

2. Offer and Order Services
- Keep offer creation, pricing, order creation, payment, ticketing, and servicing as separate capabilities.
- Store normalized order state and airline-native references.
- Preserve raw airline messages where needed for audit, reconciliation, and support.

3. Content Normalization
- Normalize branded fares, fare rules, ancillaries, seat maps, baggage, taxes, and penalties.
- Keep source-specific extensions without leaking them into every consumer.
- Version mappings when airline behavior changes.

4. Resilience
- Add timeouts, retries, idempotency keys, duplicate booking protection, and recovery jobs.
- Monitor latency, conversion, failed orders, ticketing status, and settlement mismatches.
- Provide operational tools to inspect and repair stuck orders.

5. Delivery Model
- Start with a limited airline, market, and servicing scope.
- Certify core flows before scaling ancillary and post-booking capabilities.
- Expand incrementally with automated regression tests for each airline adapter.