OTA NDC Readiness Guide

This guide summarizes what online travel agencies should prepare before integrating NDC content.

1. Content Strategy
- Decide which airline partners and markets justify direct NDC integration.
- Identify which products need to appear in search results: fares, bundles, seats, bags, meals, and other ancillaries.
- Define how NDC content will be compared with GDS and low-cost carrier content.

2. Search and Offer Handling
- Plan for richer offer data, airline-specific merchandising, and branded fare attributes.
- Confirm caching, response time, timeout, and fallback requirements.
- Normalize offers so customers can compare products consistently.

3. Booking and Payment
- Validate passenger, document, contact, payment, and ticketing requirements for each airline.
- Plan for payment authorization, settlement, fraud checks, and booking recovery flows.
- Define how failed or pending orders will be reconciled.

4. Servicing
- Prepare for order changes, cancellations, refunds, split passenger actions, schedule changes, and voluntary exchanges.
- Identify which servicing actions will be self-service and which need agent support.
- Document airline-specific restrictions before launch.

5. Operations and Reporting
- Update customer support tools to display NDC orders clearly.
- Train support teams on order IDs, ticketing state, refund state, and airline ownership.
- Ensure revenue, conversion, attachment, and failure reporting are available from launch.