Virgin Goes Aggregator-First, PROS Ships a Catalog

Eric Marketts

Welcome to the V1 Airline Retailing Report. I'm Eric Marketts.

Steph Nell

And I'm Steph Nell. Eric, what happened this week?

Eric Marketts

Three launches. Virgin Atlantic launched NDC for the UK travel trade. Ethiopian Airlines went live on an aggregator called AirGateway. And PROS launched an agentic retailing platform called Kairos.

Steph Nell

Three real launches. And in all three, the same things are missing. Fees. Volumes. Customers. Prices. Again this week, the sale was the headline and the terms were the footnote.

Eric Marketts

We read the announcements. Then we look at where agentic AI really stands at airlines, and why we are handling one set of numbers with care.

Steph Nell

And in the first segment, a short lesson on the three routes an airline can use to reach a travel agent. This week's news only makes sense if you know them.

Eric Marketts

Start with Virgin Atlantic. On October 16, the trade outlet Travel Gossip reported that Virgin launched NDC for the UK travel trade. The rollout is phased, and servicing capabilities are available from launch. The first connections are direct to Virgin and through an aggregator called Travelfusion. GDS aggregation is set to follow, and Virgin plans to expand its aggregator partnerships through 2027. Content stays available through the older EDIFACT channels for partners not yet ready to switch.

Steph Nell

And Virgin's vice president of sales, Anthony Uphill, said NDC will increasingly be where Virgin's best content and retailing capabilities sit.

Eric Marketts

That is the line to watch. Virgin says more content, ancillaries, fare options and retailing capabilities will be added over time. What we did not find is a fee schedule, a list of which servicing functions work at launch, or a release from Virgin itself. Our source is trade coverage.

Steph Nell

One piece of context matters here. Virgin has had GDS deals on paper for NDC for years. In December 2023, Travelport announced a renewed Virgin agreement that included future NDC distribution, subject to implementation. Amadeus and Virgin expanded their agreement to cover future NDC content too, according to a TravelPulse page last updated in April 2023. And in March 2024, Virgin's CEO told The Business Travel Magazine that Virgin and its partner Delta would take a considered approach to NDC and would not surprise trade partners.

Eric Marketts

So "GDS later" is not new. It is three years after the paperwork.

Steph Nell

Right. And we cannot tell from the coverage whether the sequence is a choice or a constraint. We will come back to that.

Eric Marketts

Now Ethiopian Airlines. The agreement was announced October 16. Ethiopian's NDC content is live on AirGateway, a Berlin-based aggregator. AirGateway serves more than 550 accredited agencies in over 60 markets and connects to more than 35 airlines. Agencies, travel management companies and consolidators can search, book and manage Ethiopian flights through AirGateway's BookingPad platform and API.

Steph Nell

What can they do with a booking?

Eric Marketts

Hold it or ticket it immediately, and pay by cash or credit card. Post-booking servicing is supported: seat selection, cancellations, refunds and rebooking. Neither company disclosed financial terms. And we found no figure for how many AirGateway agencies sell Ethiopian today or how many will adopt the connection.

Steph Nell

This is also not Ethiopian's first NDC channel. Background from the CAPA news service notes earlier partnerships with Verteil and Afro Atlas. And in November 2025, Ethiopian began processing NDC transactions through ARC Direct Connect, reported as the first airline on ARC's Transaction API. So this is a new route, not a first.

Eric Marketts

One more, quickly. Japan Airlines. In a release dated September 24, JAL said it will roll out NDC content for international tickets through the Amadeus Travel Platform. Sales in Japan began October 1. Overseas sales began October 13, across 26 countries and regions. The release describes it as a first for a Japanese airline, and it discloses no fees, commissions or incentives.

Steph Nell

Now the lesson I promised. There are three routes from an airline to a travel agent.

Eric Marketts

Go.

Steph Nell

One, direct. The agency connects its own systems to the airline. Ethiopian's own NDC page says this suits large agencies, travel management companies and online agencies with the IT resources to do it. Two, an aggregator. A technology company sits between the airline and the agencies and handles the NDC message traffic. Three, a global distribution system, the traditional route, which has also been adding NDC content.

Eric Marketts

Why does the route matter?

Steph Nell

Because of how the product is built. In the filed-fare world, fares are filed to a central system, and that system assembles the price from filed fares and availability. Every seller sees the same kind of display. In NDC, the airline's own offer engine builds the offer at the moment of the request. That is more flexible. It is also why servicing is hard. A change or a refund on an offer the airline built needs the airline and the channel to agree on the order. When you hear "servicing at launch," ask three questions. Which functions? In which channels? And who carries the cost?

Eric Marketts

Bull case, bear case.

Steph Nell

The bull case. Virgin and Ethiopian both say servicing is available at launch. That addresses the part of NDC that has historically done worst. By the standard we set in Episode 21, that is a claim, not proof. The bear case. No fees, no volumes, and no confirmed corporate features, such as loyalty identifiers or approvals. Virgin's launch is for UK trade. And GDS NDC content, signed on paper years ago, is still in the future tense. Our read, and it is our inference: Virgin took the routes it could control first, direct and one aggregator, and left the GDS routes for after. We cannot tell whether that was a choice or a constraint.

Eric Marketts

Tie it back to Delta.

Steph Nell

In Episode 24, we reported Delta's dated list from Business Travel News. Changes to private fare bookings in the first quarter of 2027. Corporate loyalty identifiers in the second. International sales in the third. Back in Episode 21, we called Delta's servicing-first approach a testable claim, not a proven one. We noted that American and United fixed their servicing gaps with live volume, and that Delta had not yet had that test. The corporate pieces on Delta's list still sit in 2027. Virgin says servicing is there at launch, and Ethiopian says the same. Same standard applies. Those are claims until live volume tests them, and nobody has published corporate volume moving through any of these lanes. One more observation, clearly as inference. Virgin's CEO tied Virgin's pace to Delta's in 2024. Virgin launched this month, and Delta has said it plans to launch by year-end. We found no statement that they are coordinating. We note the timing and nothing more.

Eric Marketts

On October 15, PhocusWire ran a piece titled "Four scenarios for flight booking in the age of agentic AI." It leans on two sources. ATPCO's AI research, and a report from TNMT, part of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub.

Steph Nell

Numbers first, and a caution.

Eric Marketts

ATPCO's research found that 37 percent of airlines have active internal AI programs, and 11 percent have AI agents in place. PhocusWire presents the 11 percent as deployed agentic AI.

Steph Nell

Here is the caution. The ATPCO page we found dates that post May 5. PhocusWire cited the figures this week, so they are not new. And we found no sample size. Treat them as a rough indicator, not a measurement.

Eric Marketts

The deployments PhocusWire cited are in service. United added agentic disruption management to its app in early September. If a flight is canceled, the app rebooks the passenger automatically and can place them on standby for up to three earlier flights. Malaysia Airlines launched an assistant called Mavis earlier this year, built on Ada's agentic customer experience platform. It handles complex requests and hands off to a human only where needed.

Steph Nell

Notice what those are. Rebooking and customer service. Both sit inside the airline's own relationship with its own customer.

Eric Marketts

TNMT's report is called "How agentic AI could reshape flight booking in the 2030s." It lays out four futures. We will cover three.

Steph Nell

The first future: AI search, but no agentic booking. Travelers use AI to look and refuse to hand over the final decision. Airlines stay focused on their own channels, and look-to-book ratios rise.

Eric Marketts

The second: airlines are shut out. Travelers trust agents to book for them, but airlines fail to secure the customer context and the transaction layer, and online agencies and other intermediaries take it.

Steph Nell

And the third: airlines embrace agentic. They make their full offer visible, understandable and bookable inside agent environments.

Eric Marketts

TNMT says the goal was not to predict one future. It was to explore what each could mean for distribution, customer relationships and commercial strategy.

Steph Nell

Three executives quoted in the article are worth hearing. Flight Centre's John Morhous says that in business travel the company pays, so the human stays accountable, not the agent. He expects the winners to be whoever holds the most complete, policy-aware version of the offer. Revidio's Richard Edwards says online agencies have a first-mover advantage, and that airlines will recognize the danger, but it may take three or four years. And Accelya's chief technology officer, Gaurav Roy, asks whether airlines want to participate as intelligent retailers or as inventory providers. He says that if airlines do not expose their data to AI, agents will either make things up or flood them with requests.

Eric Marketts

Now ATPCO. It ran a two-week proof of concept on matching a request in everyday language to the structured airline data needed to find the right products. It connected records across its fare data, its product catalog and Routehappy that refer to the same product. ATPCO's vice president of technology, Anand Mishra, told PhocusWire that assistants are already good at understanding what a traveler asks. The hard part is linking that intent to structured airline data.

Steph Nell

And what is next?

Eric Marketts

Scaling the approach, and making the rules in ATPCO's data standards machine-readable. Longer term, Mishra described an idea ATPCO is exploring, an airline context protocol. It would be a standard handshake between large language models, airlines and online travel agencies. In the coverage we read, it is exploratory. We found no specification, no timeline and no named participants.

Steph Nell

Connect that to Episode 23. Sabre said MCP is the new NDC, and we said the protocol changed but the intermediation economics did not. An airline context protocol is a different move. It asks who defines the handshake. Our read, and not ATPCO's claim: if the handshake is defined on the airline side, the offer stays with the airline. If the agent platform defines it, the offer is whatever the agent can parse. It also tests the line from Episode 22 that legibility is a capability you build, not a protocol you join.

Eric Marketts

Bull case, bear case.

Steph Nell

The bull case. The industry is naming the problem before the traffic arrives, and ATPCO is building the data layer an agent would need. The bear case. We found no breakdown of the eleven percent, and the deployments PhocusWire cited sit in service, not booking. A proof of concept is not a standard. And the TNMT report is a set of scenarios, not a forecast. Our read, from the examples cited and not from a finding in the report: the airline-run deployments sit where the airline already owns the customer relationship, in servicing. Booking by agents is happening, but through third parties, as we covered with Mindtrip in Episode 19 and the Egencia connector in Episode 20.

Eric Marketts

And the watch item.

Steph Nell

Since Episode 8, we have watched for the first carrier to publish terms for AI agents. Last week we graded it half done, on American's permission rule. This week we looked again for an airline that has published a price per AI query. We found none. The watch item is unchanged.

Eric Marketts

PROS announced Kairos on October 12, according to PhocusWire. It is billed as a new agentic airline retailing platform that puts PROS pricing science, airline data and AI in one workspace. PROS calls agentic AI a foundational capability.

Steph Nell

And what actually shipped?

Eric Marketts

The first release is two capabilities. Product Catalog and Stock Keeper. Both require new commercial agreements. Kairos does not replace existing PROS products. Those move into the platform progressively, and current agreements do not change automatically. PROS says it plans to extend agents across revenue management, dynamic pricing, shopping, group sales optimization and offer marketing. It is adopting the Databricks data and AI platform as its foundation.

Steph Nell

Context.

Eric Marketts

PROS decided in February 2026 to focus only on travel retailing. Software investment firm Thoma Bravo acquired the company in December 2025, at a valuation PhocusWire puts at 1.4 billion dollars. The coverage we read names no Kairos customers and gives no pricing.

Steph Nell

Second item.

Eric Marketts

Retailaer. In PhocusWire's October 16 news briefs, Retailaer opened an early access program that lets airlines test retailing capabilities without replacing their passenger service system. It is open to a limited number of airlines that apply. There are six use cases. Automated group bookings. Vouchers and gift cards. Split payments. Self-service booking management. Digital wallets. And AI-powered booking and servicing through model context protocol. Airlines test with their own data and measure the revenue effect before expanding. No participating airline or pricing is named. PhocusWire's brief is our only source. We did not find a Retailaer release.

Steph Nell

We covered the MCP-as-standard argument in Episode 23. We are not reopening it. Note only that here MCP is one use case in a list of six.

Eric Marketts

Why does this segment belong in the same episode?

Steph Nell

A product catalog is the list of products an airline is allowed to sell. If the catalog cannot describe a product in structured terms, an agent cannot find it, and neither can a channel. Compare that to ATPCO's problem in the last segment. ATPCO is trying to match a request to structured airline products. PROS is shipping a tool for defining those products. That connection is our inference. Neither company said it.

Eric Marketts

Bull case, bear case.

Steph Nell

The bull case. Modules let airlines start without ripping out the core, and Retailaer's program lets them measure revenue first. The bear case. Both are vendor claims with no named customers. And for PROS, new commercial agreements mean new spend before there is proof.

Eric Marketts

And the read?

Steph Nell

Two vendors this week are selling retailing in pieces that sit next to the passenger service system. In Episode 23, Kenya Airways went the other way. It moved its reservations, inventory and Offer and Order core to Sabre Mosaic, kept NDC distribution with Amadeus, and put its direct channel on Branchspace. So the market is not moving one direction. Entry points are multiplying. Some airlines replace the core, and others add modules and test. We cannot say which wins. One airline respondent in PhocusWire's 2026 airline retailing survey said airlines are generally cash poor and end up reliant on legacy providers. That is one respondent's view, and it is a reason a low-commitment entry point would appeal.

Eric Marketts

Virgin and Ethiopian say servicing is available at launch, and the fees and volumes were not published.

Steph Nell

The industry is describing agentic futures, while ATPCO's research puts AI agents in place at 11 percent of airlines, and the deployments cited sit in service.

Eric Marketts

PROS and Retailaer are selling retailing in pieces, and neither named a customer.

Steph Nell

In each case, the launch was the headline and the terms were the footnote. Four things to watch. The first fee schedule on an aggregator-first NDC launch. A corporate volume figure through any NDC servicing lane. The next airline to publish AI terms with a number in them. And when Virgin's GDS NDC content actually arrives.

Eric Marketts

We have no corrections this week.

Eric Marketts

Sources for every story are in the show notes.

Steph Nell

The V1 Airline Retailing Report publishes every Monday. I'm Steph Nell.

Eric Marketts

And I'm Eric Marketts. See you next week.