Episodes (8)

The V1 Airline Retailing Report

Episode 008 — "The Squeeze: Profits Halved, Search Costs Unbounded, Intermediaries Circling"

Published: Monday, June 15, 2026

Episode Description

Airline net margins are forecast to fall to two percent this year. That is not a buffer. It is a rounding error, and it is the lens for everything happening in distribution right now.

This week on The V1 Airline Retailing Report, Eric and Steph trace a single pressure across three stories. Airlines are getting squeezed from the macro and from the distribution stack at the same time, and the intermediaries are not waiting for the margin to recover.

Three narratives, one squeeze: the financial reality Willie Walsh laid out in his farewell, the compute bill AI agents are handing airlines without anyone's consent, and the metasearch player already moving to own the agent relationship while carriers are heads down.

This Week's Stories

Story 1 — Walsh's Last Warning: A Two Percent Margin Is Not a Buffer
In his final address as IATA Director General at the 82nd AGM in Rio, Willie Walsh forecast industry net profit falling from $45 billion in 2025 to $23 billion in 2026, with net margin compressing from 4.2% to 2%. Fuel is up roughly 70% year over year, adding about $100 billion to the bill, against a supply chain backlog above 18,000 aircraft and a record fleet age of 15.2 years. Eric and Steph break down why demand holding up is the real bull case, why a 2% margin turns the right strategic move into a treasury problem, and what Walsh's farewell was actually about: an industry that absorbs everyone else's costs and has no pricing power to push back.

📰 Business Traveller — Willie Walsh Leaves IATA With a Blunt Warning for Aviation's Fragile Recovery
📰 IATA — Willie Walsh's Report on the State of the Global Air Transport Industry, 82nd AGM

Story 2 — 881,076 Searches for One Ticket: The Cost Nobody Agreed To
A traveler who wanted a single ticket pointed Claude Code at the Etihad website and pulled 881,076 fare options — every date in a month-long range, every stopover, every combination across four routes. Skift's reporting puts a number on a structural break: the look-to-book ratio held for fifty years because humans stop searching, and AI agents don't. Eric and Steph dig into why this is a cost imposed without a commercial relationship, why NDC makes airlines more exposed rather than less, and the one move that will signal the industry has finally internalized the problem — the first airline to publish an explicit AI traffic policy.

📰 Skift — The High Cost of Infinite Search: How AI Agents Break Travel Economics
📰 Skift — The Two-Sided AI Squeeze That Only Travel Faces

Story 3 — While Airlines Absorb the Squeeze, Skyscanner Moves on the Agent
Skyscanner CEO Bryan Batista told Skift he is exploring agentic booking to ease the handoff to advertisers and sees personal agents as part of the future of flight metasearch. Skyscanner, owned by Trip.com Group, has expanded into B2B and is pushing harder into the U.S. Eric and Steph explain why an incumbent experimenting in the open is genuinely useful, why metasearch already tried on-site booking once and reverted, and the harder question for carriers: whoever owns the agent handoff owns the moment of intent, and right now that owner is not an airline.

📰 Skift — Skyscanner CEO on Agentic Booking and the Future of Flight Metasearch

The Bottom Line

The industry keeps treating margin, compute cost, and the agent front end as three separate conversations. They are one. A 2% net margin is the reason the other two are dangerous instead of merely interesting, because airlines now have the least capital to defend their distribution exactly when the distribution game is being recontested. AI agents are imposing cost the stack was never built to absorb, and the intermediaries are moving to own the agent relationship while carriers are heads down on survival. The airline that names an owner for AI traffic and agent strategy this year buys itself room. The one that waits for the margin to recover first will be negotiating from a weaker position every quarter it waits.

About the Show

The V1 Airline Retailing Report is produced by V1 Advisory LLC and publishes every Monday. Every episode surfaces the two or three stories that matter most in airline and travel retailing — and delivers the 360-degree analysis that helps commercial leaders, distribution professionals, and travel technology executives understand what's really happening and what to do about it.

Hosted by:

- Eric Marketts — Tech and aviation journalist, co-host
- Steph Nell — Airline distribution expert and consultant, co-host and analyst

Intro music: The perfect corporate podcast intro by Lundstroem. Licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.
The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
© 2026 V1 Advisory LLC. All rights reserved. | v1advisory.co

Airlines spent a decade fighting to own their offer. This week three stories mark the same battle line from three angles — and together they reveal who's standing between the airline and the buyer right now.

This week on The V1 Airline Retailing Report, Eric and Steph build one argument across three floors of the same building: the PSS incumbency layer, the MCP agent interface forming above it, and the IATA program running through both. The question threading all three is the same: after NDC and Offer & Order, who owns the offer next?

Sabre's legal complaint against Amadeus has a new frame — and it's more important than the lawsuit. Sabre CEO Kurt Ekert accused Amadeus of using Altéa PSS control to block competing Offer and Order solutions, and announced regulatory and legal action. The bull case is real: if EU competition authorities find what Sabre is describing — airlines constrained, not choosing — forced interoperability at the PSS layer would open the O&O technology market in a way commercial competition hasn't achieved. Airlines with no practical path to Sabre's OSD or Accelya's FLX would get a genuine option. The bear case is the evidence problem: every public Nevio confirmation since Sabre filed — Air France-KLM, British Airways, Saudia — is an airline appearing to choose voluntarily, which is the opposite of the coercion regulators need to see. But the deeper point is structural. The PSS has become the modern distribution chokepoint the way the GDS was for thirty years. The difference: the GDS held data. The PSS runs the airline. You cannot build a parallel pipe around the system that processes your check-in, your inventory, and your departure control. The chokepoint moved. The incumbency advantage moved with it.

Model Context Protocol — the AI-to-data standard the tech industry has converged on — landed in airline distribution this week. TPConnects added MCP layers to its Iris and Astra platforms, exposing more than 60 airlines through a single machine-readable interface and normalizing NDC schema fragmentation for AI agents. The bull case: MCP solves the problem NDC created. Airlines built NDC to own their offer but implemented it differently at every carrier. An MCP normalization layer gives AI agents one clean interface. If agents become the dominant shopping front end — IDC projects 30% of bookings through agents by 2030 — airlines reach travelers without paying a new intermediary at the search layer. The bear case: a normalization layer over 60 airlines is still an aggregator. Whoever controls that layer controls what agents see, what they prioritize, and how airline content ranks. Airlines that spent a decade pulling offer creation in-house could find themselves handing the demand interface to whoever owns the best agent connection. The critical take: agents do not care about brand, bundles, or merchandising strategy. They return the math. Everything airlines built modern retailing to enable — rich content, dynamic offers, experiential ancillaries — gets compressed by an agent into a row in a comparison table. The MCP layer is not just plumbing. It is the moment airlines discover whether their offer survives being read by a machine.

The IATA AGM in Rio delivered the most substantive Offer and Order progress report the program has ever produced — and a timeline that demands honesty. Seven full-scope airline O&O contracts now in place. Forty-eight pilots or proofs of concept. IT-provider tenders doubling year on year. Riyadh Air live as the first full-service greenfield carrier on native O&O. TMCs reporting NDC bookings up more than 150% year over year. Qantas and the ATMC held a transparency forum on NDC adoption in Sydney on June 2. The bull case: these numbers are not slideware. The shift from experimentation to material volume is visible, and airlines that move now retire legacy cost and own their offer while competitors are still scoping. The bear case: seven full-scope contracts across an industry of 300 to 400 airlines is a thin base, most IT providers don't finish current builds until 2027 or 2028, and the IATA roadmap quietly acknowledges the full transition runs past 2030 for most carriers. The critical take: the winners in this transition will not be whoever reaches 100% Offer and Order first. They will be whoever runs the messy middle most cheaply — managing NDC plus EDIFACT plus O&O simultaneously, for the rest of this decade, without the cost and complexity eating the retailing upside. Coexistence is not a transition problem. It is the product.

Stories Referenced in This Episode

Narrative 1 — Sabre vs. Amadeus: PSS as the New Chokepoint
- Sabre Claims Amadeus Blocks Competition in Airline Technology — Skift, May 7, 2026

Narrative 2 — The MCP Layer Arrives
- MCP vs. NDC and other challenges facing airline distribution — PhocusWire, 2026
- Iris MCP Layer Enables AI Airline Distribution — TPConnects, 2026
- MCP Explained: The AI Standard Reshaping Travel Tech — Skift, December 2025

Narrative 3 — IATA AGM Rio: Real Momentum, Honest Timeline
- Progress on the journey to 100% Offers and Orders — IATA, December 18, 2025
- Modern Airline Retailing Industry Transition Roadmap — IATA, 2026
- Qantas and ATMC Forge New Path on NDC — Travel and Tour World, June 2, 2026

The Bottom Line

Airlines won the right to own their offer. They immediately found new gatekeepers forming above and below them. The PSS incumbency layer — which Sabre named publicly but hasn't yet been able to dislodge commercially or legally — is the chokepoint that determines whether O&O transformation is genuinely competitive or effectively pre-decided. The MCP normalization layer is building a new demand interface for the agentic era, and it's forming outside airline standards bodies without airline input. And the IATA program in Rio confirmed what the roadmap has said quietly for two years: the industry lives in hybrid coexistence until the early 2030s. The three floors of the same building. The airline that runs the messy middle cheaply — managing three distribution stacks, staying visible to agents, and actually deciding what to sell through the system it's building — wins the decade. Not the one that crosses the finish line first.

Intro music: The perfect corporate podcast intro by Lundstroem. Licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.
The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
V1 Advisory LLC | v1advisory.co

Related: Tasks | V1-Advisory-Status | V1-Airline-Retailing-Report-Podcast-Guide

Episode 006 — While You Were Debating Transformation, Amadeus Actually Built It

Published: Monday, June 1, 2026

Episode Description

The world's first airline Native Order was created on May 5. No PNR. No e-ticket. No legacy artifact. Just a single unified record — live, on Finnair.com, through Amadeus Nevio. While Sabre was drafting a legal complaint about monopolistic behavior, Amadeus answered the antitrust challenge the only way that actually matters: commercially.

Eric Marketts and Steph Nell start with the production fact everything hangs on, then trace it outward — to the legal fight it undercuts, and the deployment wave it's already triggering. Then they stop talking about infrastructure entirely. Because the harder question is the one nobody is asking: when you finish building the system, what are you actually going to sell through it?

Three stories and one question this week, built around a single argument: the infrastructure question is being answered. The retailing question has barely been asked.

This Week's Stories

Story 1: Finnair Native Order — Production Fact, Not Just a Milestone
On May 5, Finnair became the first airline to issue a Native Order through Amadeus Nevio — a live booking with no PNR, no e-ticket, no EMD. Since that date, Amadeus has processed 40 million additional Nevio bookings. Air France-KLM, British Airways, and Saudia have all confirmed Nevio selections. Eric and Steph cover what this actually proves, what it doesn't, and where the real test is coming — watch Air France-KLM, not Finnair. It's the production fact the rest of the episode hangs on.

📰 Amadeus Newsroom — Finnair Becomes First Airline Globally to Create a Native Order
📰 Travel and Tour World — Finnair, Air France-KLM, Saudia and British Airways Embrace Amadeus Nevio

Story 2: Sabre's Legal Complaint Now Has a Production Problem
Sabre CEO Kurt Ekert publicly accused Amadeus of monopolistic behavior in the O&O space and announced regulatory and legal action in early May. In the six weeks since, Amadeus confirmed four major carriers on Nevio — Air France-KLM, British Airways, Saudia, and Finnair, which went live with the world's first Native Order. Eric and Steph break down why the legal clock is now running against Sabre, why voluntary adoption is a problem for an antitrust argument, and what winning would actually require from Sabre at this point.

📰 Skift — Sabre Claims Amadeus Blocks Competition in Airline Technology
📰 Skift — Amadeus Widens Its Travel Tech Domain as Sabre Fight Escalates
📰 The Company Dime — Sabre Accuses Amadeus of Anticompetitive Behavior

Story 3: Coforge Aeronova.AI — Read the Launch, Not Just the Product
Coforge launched Aeronova.AI on May 21 — a purpose-built execution framework for airlines doing the Offer and Order transition. Pre-built integration assets, AI-assisted automation, airline-specific implementation playbooks. Not a competing platform. An accelerator. Steph breaks down why the product matters less than what the launch signals: when engineering services firms productize around a transformation program, the deployment wave is already forming.

📰 Business Wire — Coforge Launches Aeronova.AI

Commentary: Now Here's the Question Nobody's Asking
The industry is finally having the right conversation about O&O infrastructure. This week's commentary asks the one that comes next, and it draws directly on Jim Hetzel's May 28 opinion piece. His "why now" is the margin emergency: jet fuel roughly doubled after the strikes on Iran, international fares jumped 30 to 40%, and United's Scott Kirby warned the added fuel cost alone would exceed the airline's best annual profit ever. The reflex — cut capacity, add surcharges, wait it out — has a low ceiling. The unused lever is non-air content. Global airline ancillary revenue is $148 billion, but for most major U.S. carriers 40 to 50% of that is loyalty miles sold to credit card companies, and bags and seats make up most of the rest. Meanwhile the global tours, activities, and attractions market is $271 billion, only 33% digitized, and airlines — who hold the customer at the exact moment of trip intent — capture almost none of it. NDC gave you the pipes. Offer and Order is cleaning them up. Someone still has to decide what flows through them.

📰 LinkedIn — Opinion: You Spent a Decade Implementing NDC. You Still Don't Know How to Retail. (Jim Hetzel)

Data cited in the commentary:
📊 Oxford Economics — A Conflict-Driven Fuel Price Surge Is Raising Airfares and Slowing Global Air Travel Demand
📊 IdeaWorksCompany & CarTrawler — Airline Ancillary Revenue Reaches $148.4 Billion Worldwide for 2024
📊 Arival & Phocuswright — Travel Experiences Market Reaches $271B, Surging Toward $342B by 2029

The Bottom Line

Amadeus has the only production-validated O&O platform running on a full-service network carrier. Sabre is trying to litigate a market position that is now a production fact — and losing commercial ground every week the legal clock runs. The deployment market is mobilizing: Coforge building a productized framework is a signal, not just a vendor announcement. But the harder conversation, the one the industry needs to have in parallel with the infrastructure one, is what airlines are actually going to sell through the system they're building. With fuel costs spiking and fares hitting a ceiling, that question is no longer theoretical — it's a 2026 margin problem. You can have the world's most sophisticated retailing architecture and still be a bad retailer. Read Jim Hetzel's opinion piece for the full argument; it's the sharpest framing of the retailing gap we've seen this year.

About the Show

The V1 Airline Retailing Report is produced by V1 Advisory LLC and publishes every Monday. Every episode surfaces the two or three stories that matter most in airline and travel retailing — and delivers the 360-degree analysis that helps commercial leaders, distribution professionals, and travel technology executives understand what's really happening and what to do about it.

Human content and insights - AI hosted

Intro music: The perfect corporate podcast intro by Lundstroem. Licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
V1 Advisory LLC | v1advisory.co

Related: Tasks | V1-Advisory-Status | V1-Airline-Retailing-Report-Podcast-Guide

© 2026 V1 Advisory LLC. All rights reserved.

## Episode 005 — "Born Native, Booked on the For You Page, and the Deadline Just Got Real"

Published: Monday, May 25, 2026

Episode Description

Last week we said the window to shape how AI agents access airline inventory is open right now. This week, three things happened that made that window measurably smaller.

This week on The V1 Airline Retailing Report, Eric and Steph break down a week in which the industry's infrastructure argument stopped being theoretical — and what that means for every airline still deciding when to move.

On May 20, Riyadh Air became the world's first full-service network airline to launch entirely on Offer and Order. Powered by FLYR's platform and built on IATA ONE Order standards, with IBM handling the integration layer, Riyadh Air went live with no PNR, no e-ticket, and no legacy passenger service system. One Order ID. First commercial flight: Riyadh to London Heathrow, July 1. The bull case: the question "has any full-service carrier actually done this?" now has an answer, and that answer removes the last credible reason to treat O&O as unproven. The bear case: Riyadh Air is a greenfield carrier with sovereign wealth backing and zero legacy infrastructure to migrate — the hardest version of this problem, faced by every major incumbent with 40 years of PSS debt, remains entirely unsolved. Eric's take: the bar just moved. The excuses are gone. Airlines that haven't started are no longer waiting for proof — they're just waiting.

On May 12, TikTok launched TikTok GO in the United States — a travel booking platform built directly into the app, with Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com as launch partners. Users discover a destination through TikTok content and book hotels, tours, and experiences without leaving the app. Creator monetization is built in. The bull case: TikTok has over 170 million US users, a significant share of whom are already making destination decisions through TikTok content. Closing the gap between inspiration and transaction inside the same session is a fundamentally new distribution surface. The bear case: airlines are not in the launch partner set — and there are structural reasons why flight booking doesn't convert the same way as a $90 experience or a $200 hotel night. The critical take: the problem for airlines is not what TikTok GO is today. It's where the customer is when they leave it. A traveler who books the hotel and the tour through TikTok GO is searching for a flight with an itinerary already designed without airline input. The discovery-to-booking pipeline for leisure travel just moved — and airlines weren't invited to build it.

On May 6, Sabre, Mindtrip, and PayPal put the industry's first end-to-end agentic booking system into production. A user converses with Mindtrip's AI, the agent builds an itinerary, the user approves, and PayPal completes the payment inside the conversation — no redirect, no human agent. The Sabre GDS pipe provides the flight content. Real transactions. Real money. The bull case: the three layers that must work together for agentic booking — content access, AI reasoning, payment execution — are working now, not in 2028. Airlines fully represented in Sabre's GDS pipe can be found, priced, and booked by this agent today. The bear case: the agent sees GDS-piped content, not the airline's native offer. Airlines that have built NDC-only fares, dynamic pricing, or rich ancillary bundles outside the GDS pipe may find that their most competitive inventory is invisible to the first generation of production agentic systems — the structural irony of modern distribution doing most of the work and getting the least of the credit. The critical take: last week we asked whether your content was machine-readable. This week that question has a live production system attached to it. The deadline moved forward.

Stories Referenced in This Episode

Narrative 1 — Riyadh Air & FLYR: The World's First Full-Service O&O Airline
- FLYR Powers Riyadh Air's Debut as World's First Full-Service Airline Built for Modern Retailing — GlobeNewswire, May 20, 2026
- Riyadh Air and FLYR Launch the World's First Offer & Order Network Airline — Airline RGS
- Riyadh Air Launches with FLYR Offer & Order Platform — Travel Daily News

Narrative 2 — TikTok GO: Social Commerce Enters the Travel Distribution Stack
- TikTok Turns Travel Videos Into Bookable Stays and Experiences — Skift, May 12, 2026
- TikTok Now Wants to Be the Place You Book the Trip You Just Saw on TikTok — TechCrunch, May 12, 2026
- TikTok Formalizes In-App Travel Bookings with Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com Among Partners — PhocusWire
- TikTok Launches Travel Booking Platform TikTok GO — Globetrender, May 19, 2026

Narrative 3 — Sabre + Mindtrip + PayPal: Agentic Booking in Production
- Sabre, Mindtrip, and PayPal Launch Agentic AI Travel Booking — Skift, May 6, 2026
- Mindtrip Launches Travel's First All-In-One Agentic AI Flight Booking Experience — Sabre Newsroom, May 6, 2026

The Bottom Line

Riyadh Air proves the technology works at full-service scale and removes the last excuse for waiting. TikTok GO builds the discovery-to-booking pipeline for leisure travel and leaves airlines out of the architecture. And the Sabre-Mindtrip-PayPal system makes agentic booking a production reality — today, not in 2028. In each of these three narratives, the same pattern holds: the distribution environment is being rebuilt around airlines, not with them. The window to change that is open. It did not get larger this week.

Intro music: The perfect corporate podcast intro by Lundstroem. Licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.
The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
V1 Advisory LLC | v1advisory.co

Related: Tasks | V1-Advisory-Status | V1-Airline-Retailing-Report-Podcast-Guide

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.
The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
V1 Advisory LLC | v1advisory.co

Related: Tasks | V1-Advisory-Status | V1-Airline-Retailing-Report-Podcast-Guide

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