Product updates

In my last blog Four Ways to avoid an NDC winter I discussed how overcoming the credibility gap between the early adopters and early majority was a critical stage in our NDC journey. For the final blog in this series, I discuss how focusing on product related factors can influence adoption as well. Unlike the movie Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner is told ‘If you build it, he will come’, if we want NDC to hit some home runs, we need to do more than simply build. We must also focus our attention on the factors that will drive adoption.

There are several product related factors that influence adoption which can all be assessed by asking five simple questions:

1.    Does the new product offer clear benefits over the incumbent?

2.    Is the new product consistent with the customers’ existing experience?

3.    Is the product easy to understand?

4.    Is the new product easy to try?

5.    Can customers see others using the new product?

The more questions you can answer yes to, the easier the path to mass adoption.

How would we answer these questions for NDC and NDC enabled content?

The answer to the first question is clearly “yes”. The new NDC standard and resulting technologies offer a clear advantage over the existing standards and technology in terms of flexibility, interoperability and speed to market.

However, even with NDC’s promise of richer, more relevant content, convenience, and choice, it’s difficult to answer ‘yes’ to the remaining four questions. After all, NDC will:

• significantly alter the shopping experience for travelers,
• provide new rich and diverse content while simultaneously creating more complexity, making things such as comparison shopping difficult,
• be difficult to “try” due to Integration requirements with existing infrastructure, business processes, tools, reporting and workflows,
• require more case studies and evidence beyond small scale pilots.

All these challenges have the potential to slow adoption but we can tip the scale in our favor if we filter NDC product priority and initiatives through the lens of these 5 simple questions and focus on turning all the answers to “yes”.

Tipping the adoption scale with product focused change

Here are some of the things I believe can make a difference:

• Delivering consistency with the travelers existing experience – NDC is focused on improving the customer experience so this is not about ensuring NDC-enabled content looks like traditional content. It is about highlighting the key servicing and capability gaps filled by NDC. By identifying and focusing on the opportunities to improve current capabilities and closing the gaps for business travelers, we can showcase incremental benefits and deliver an enhanced traveler experience.
  
  
• Making NDC content easier to understand – The ability for the industry to deliver a user-friendly display and focusing on 2-3 products with high traveler demand at a time will reduce the learning curve for travelers and help manage complex requirements.
  
  
• Making it easier to try and experience NDC-enabled content – By removing airline variations and standardizing the implementation of the NDC standard, we can simplify the integration of existing booking, productivity, billing and support systems,
  
  
• Making it easier to see and observe others benefiting from NDC enabled content – Continuing industry efforts to demonstrate progress but change our focus from small scale pilots to full end-to-end integrations.
  

These simple points can give key industry stakeholders a common framework to address adoption challenges across the industry and collaboratively prioritize efforts to improve adoption.

Combining this perspective with overcoming the credibility gaps for the early majority I covered in my earlier blog could be the accelerant we need to move to mass adoption.  Of course, we can only do this with a collaborative approach that aligns our goals on delivering end-to-end value to our clients and their travelers, which ultimately, is the purpose of NDC.

Image credits: Adobe Stock

Sorry Game of Thrones fans. This article has nothing to do with the House of Stark, dragons or the battle for the Iron Throne, and yet, the reference is not completely lost when it comes to NDC.

In technology terms, ’spring’ is used to express periods of extreme excitement, progress and investment, while “winter” can be seen as a period of waning interest and investment in a technology.  NDC has had a resurgence of excitement, investment and progress and we are well and truly enjoying the spring. But how do we avoid another NDC winter and ensure the benefits gained do not become lost?

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is familiar with this cycle of ‘springs’ and ‘winters’ having experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest.

What can we learn from this and how can it be applied to the NDC Journey so we can avoid an NDC ‘winter’ or ‘trough of disillusionment’ for those familiar with Gartner’s Hype Curve?

First, we need to look at the factors influencing the adoption of NDC, from both the customer(s) and product side to fully understand the path to mass adoption and critical mass.

Everett Rogers’ adoption curve includes five (5) adopter categories, each with their own traits, motivations and tolerance for risk. This curve helps us understand the adoption or acceptance of new technology as it relates to customer behavior.

Individual adoption groups prefer to listen to references and are influenced by peers within their own group and tend to have different needs.  This creates a theoretical credibility gap between each category which stems from seeking to use the group on the left as a reference base for the group on the right, when in fact they have different expectations. i.e. Innovators have a credibility gap with early adopters. The most difficult critical credibility gap to overcome on the path to mass adoption is between early adopters and early majority because they have very different expectations. This creates an opportunity for ‘winter’.

What are the early majority looking for?

Unlike early adopters, the early majority have a lower tolerance for risk and focus on concrete and proven benefits. They generally want to see solutions start to mature to further reduce risk and costs and typically need to see evidence that the innovation works before they are willing to adopt it.

So how do we minimize this gap and avoid an NDC ‘winter’?

The key to this is understanding the traits and motivations of the early majority and establish a set of anchor customers, or users that can help influence others within the early majority category.

By taking these 4 key actions I believe we can drive NDC adoption and avoid an NDC winter:

• Work with the early majority to understand the content and capabilities that have demonstrable, measurable and sustainable benefits.
• Focus efforts to release the content and capabilities most valued by these customers to build momentum.
• Simplify the messaging to describe the benefits of NDC in terms of what is available right now, not all the possibilities.
• Develop case studies and testimonials about the positive impact of NDC-enabled content for the travel program and traveler.

I am very optimistic about the opportunities to improve traveler experience through the rich content, improved choice and flexibility that will be enabled by NDC. We are clearly in NDC spring, have made significant improvements over the last year and are approaching the most difficult phase transitioning between early adopters and early majority.

By recognizing and planning for the differences between early adopters and the early majority we can bridge the so-called ‘credibility gap’, but we will need more to avoid a ‘winter’. In my third and final blog of this series, I’ll talk about the product related factors that will influence NDC adoption and the ‘levers’ we need to start moving in order to drive mass adoption.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I see “road to” in a title I think about those classic movies where the stars go on a journey that starts out with great promise only to be faced with a number of obstacles that need to be overcome to reach their final destination. I’m thinking more “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” than “Thelma and Louise”.

We’ve already faced a few obstacles on our NDC journey, but I am very optimistic about the opportunities to improve traveler experience and NDC’s ability to bring richer content, improved choice and flexibility to our clients’ travel programs. We clearly have momentum and the industry has made significant improvements over the last year, but we are facing a few more hurdles on our way to mass adoption.

To date I think the success of NDC in the business travel realm has been largely driven by what Everett Rogers refers to as, the innovators, a group of consumers who are eager to try new technologies, have a higher tolerance for nascent solutions and are willing to accept the occasional setback when new ideas prove unsuccessful, or need further enhancements.

When we look at what appealed to these innovators in the early days of NDC, a lot of attention was given to the NDC standard and enabling technologies. When you think about it, very few people talk about the technology behind EDIFACT, fare filing and scheduling used today but for some reason, we all know the details behind NDC schema version 17.1 and the benefits of xml. It is time to shift the focus back to the outcomes and benefits that NDC – and NDC-enabled content – offers versus the technology solution itself.  

As we look to broaden the appeal of NDC and ultimately move to mass adoption we need a collective traveler-centric approach to address the performance, scalability, and capability requirements of NDC enabled content. Because, while they are not an initial priority for innovators, these will be required for subsequent phases of adoption.

By putting the traveler and travel managers back at the center of the discussion it means we can quickly validate which content and capabilities hold the most potential. This allows us to address the cost, convenience, choice, and service objectives that are lacking in the current, but evolving, distribution model.

This traveler-influenced approach will naturally result in the kind of demand that will lead to the mass adoption necessary to make NDC succeed not only for the industry but also – and most importantly –  for the benefit of business travelers.

The airlines have begun this process and over the last year they have taken a test and learn approach to define a product and set of capabilities that consumers want and can use, but there is still a lot of confusion on the benefits, and impacts, particularly in the business travel space.

The success of NDC is going to be driven by the airlines’ ability to further define and release products that fit the unique needs and servicing capabilities of the business traveler and to effectively communicate the benefits of those products.

To resolve this, we require active participation by all stakeholders, and by this I mean the airlines, GDSs, travel management companies (TMCs)  aggregators and business travel consumers. As key stakeholders in the ecosystem TMCs, including CWT, play a valuable role in extending, integrating and supporting this new content in a way that complements existing business travel policies and systems.

So what do I mean by active participation by all stakeholders? In my next blog, I explain the 4 key actions I believe we can take today to sustain the momentum to mass adoption and avoid falling into an NDC ‘Winter’.