In this two part piece Timothy O'Neil-Dunne of T2Impact Management Consulting and VaultPAD Accelerator for Travel Entrepreneurs explains how airlines are going to change the way reservations are made by improving the sophistication of the supply of airline products to intermediaries, content partners and ultimately the passenger.

There is a lot of confusion and commotion concerning the IATA initiative on new distribution capability, formally known as NDC and its legal structure Resolution 787. Rather than try to explain it all, let me cut to the chase on the important parts of the debate. I regret that this is necessarily rather long.

In Part 1 of this piece, I will discuss the facts of NDC. What it does and how it was derived. In part two I will look at the protagonists and why there is a fight at all and the likely outcome.

So put your feet up, grab a drink (glass of wine is suggested) and let's chat.

Let's be clear what it is about and why it's important to the world of travel. NDC addresses a long-held problem that the messaging protocols are out of date with the forms of electronic commerce that power our lives today.

Almost everything we do has an electronic component in it, most of which we never see because it occurs in the supply chain systems in the business infrastructure. How we get our food fresh in the supermarket, how our iPhones are delivered, how our express packages arrive – all of this is managed electronically. Resolution 787 has been the change in our world that most never see. Do we care? No, we just want fresh food, an iPhone from the Apple store and Fedex to show up on time.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the world was a much simpler place. There was no ecommerce. It just did not exist. The standard form of business to business data transmissions occurred with Telex. Telex content (purely human readable text) was as simple as the character set on an old typewriter. No pictures, no funky characters such as @ signs, no complex data messages for example!

This was a somewhat secure one-way messaging system. It ensured that a message went from A to B. That's it. Everything we did then was driven by paper. The airlines needed to communicate internally and externally with one another and other stakeholders in the chain such as airports. Over time the same messaging systems were expanded so that messages could pass to external partners - caterers, ground handling companies etc. The messages became more complex as the information needs grew. Structures of the passenger information necessarily also grew.

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