Next Generation Storefront: How It Works, the Potential & the Hazards

Under ATPCO's Next Generation Storefront initiative, carriers work with the air content information and distribution company to gather, normalize and present their products via standards that enable travel agencies, online booking tools, global distribution systems and aggregators to enhance their retailing displays.

There has never before been a real retailing standard for what indirect channels display. Now, via the NGS standard, such indirect sellers use the airlines' product data to sort products into similar groups, or "shelves," represented as starred columns. Shelf placements are based on 18 attributes, including seat pitch, ticket changeability, carry-on baggage, boarding order, fare limitations, meals, Wi-Fi and aircraft details. As of now, the shelves are stamped, on an ascending scale, from one to six stars. On a shelf, shoppers can open each flight's "drawers" to see the amenities and attributes available. Beyond all this, sellers can experiment with their retailing displays, according to ATPCO director of R&D Gianni Cataldo.

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In an NGS world, he said, business travelers will be enticed to book flights in-channel. Now, corporate booking tools frustrate them, prompting them to book directly on airlines' websites. When booking direct, they tend to book at first glance, by price, and later could discover limitations "that get in the way of business getting done," such as lack of changeability in the event of delays or limited baggage allowances. That wipes out the savings travelers thought they were obtaining for their companies, he said, adding that NGS is about pushing the right information to travelers so they can make the best choices for themselves.

The Standard-Bearers

Every month, ATPCO hosts a working group to solicit feedback from indirect sellers' use cases. The initial adopters have been emerging and innovative travel management companies and booking tools: TripActions, Psngr1, TravelBank, AmTrav and Upside.

Traditional TMCs seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach before adopting the standard, United director of distribution Tye Radcliffe speculated. "They want to make sure it's adopted. ... They want to reach a point where they are comfortable to implement." Because they have a smaller footprint, the emerging players like TripActions are agile and can implement the standard more quickly, he added.

It also could be that their smaller footprints make emerging players easier targets for arm-twisting by carriers, which for over a decade have been frustrated by shopping experiences on indirect channels, which lag behind the carriers' websites. Two startups told BTN Group sister publication The Beat this year that Delta had given them ultimatums to adopt NGS or Delta would pull its content from the startups' tools. And earlier this year, Delta pulled off its content from TripActions until the TMC met the carrier's display demands.

All the major GDSs are putting resources toward NGS tests or putting it on their road maps, and all the major online booking tools and consumer booking tools are involved, Cataldo said. "The Concurs, Expedias and Travelocitys are very engaged."

Representing corporate travel buyer interests, big-name consultancies have given ATPCO "a bunch of requirements" it has yet to incorporate, according to Cataldo. These companies "are more concerned with frequency and reliability than they are on cost." He said their input has been insightful and they tend to bring the up the hardest problems to solve.

Hashing Out the Standard

The initial focus of NGS was to establish a standard for simple flights between point A and point B. Now, it's on hashing out a standard for displaying the disparate experiences on complex flights. "If you are flying to Europe, you might do a MD-11 or CRJ on the first leg to get from a regional airport to JFK, and then from JFK you may be going on a 787, two extremely different experiences," noted Cataldo. "One is 40 minutes to 30 minutes, the other is seven hours. How do you represent and show that? We've been experimenting on that."

At first, the industry seemed to view the stars as a misstep, but feedback indicates consumers have latched on to them. Even Radcliffe, who had vocally opposed the ratings, has started to come around. Cataldo hears travel buyers say the stars have helped them communicate what's in policy to their travelers, who, he said, understand star rating differences better than nebulous fare class labels. "That was an unexpected consequence of [the star ratings] we didn't really think about, which was nice." There will be changes to the star ratings, he said, but there is not yet a consensus on what those changes will be.

Innovating with NGS

Emerging adopters have taken a grid-display approach. Some, like Upside, have taken it a step farther: After the traveler has started to customize an itinerary with baggage and seat choices, Upside shows the traveler products on the higher shelf that deliver what he or she is looking for, along with the difference in price. This has led to upselling and increased customer satisfaction, Cataldo said. He hopes to see more such creativity. 

An NGS world also can support the more sophisticated airline content displays enabled by New Distribution Capability. This year, TripActions launched United's NDC-supported dynamic bundled fares and can present bundles to corporate travelers in their initial shopping results. Radcliffe said NGS has helped present United's bundles in a "more powerful and informative way."

One Travel Buyer's Comments & Concerns

NGS, however, could add to corporate travel buyer angst by helping airlines upsell. "The airlines just want to make sure that you see every class of service and every price point that can be offered in every search that you do," said InVision travel manager Jennie Robertson, a TripActions client.

NGS will show travelers more fare options, but the standard may not make it easy for travelers to differentiate between them, Robertson said, as the fares under each star rating can vary drastically. "What's included in a fare is still very confusing," she said. "The airlines all use different names. They all include different things."

Some products fall in different star categories owing to vague differences. For example, low-cost carriers' fares are lumped with other carriers' basic economy fares on the one-star shelf, even though fares from LCC Frontier are changeable for a fee while major carriers' basic economy fares are not, Robertson said. "Should they be in that category?"

As it exists now, NGS is undermining InVision's travel policy. Robertson said it exposes premium economy and first class fares to her travelers, though both are out of policy. Additionally, her travelers are allowed to book rates a certain percentage higher than the lowest available fare, but NGS seems to be actively driving them toward the more expensive bookings. "I keep having travelers book higher fares 'because it includes baggage' when the difference in fare is much higher than the cost for them to simply pay to check bags. But they are in policy because they're within our threshold," Robertson said.

Another troublesome quirk: Some companies allow travelers to upgrade and purchase amenities on their own dimes, but under NGS, that perk becomes a burden for travel programs that don't have the technology to split payment, as well as for their TMCs.

At ATPCO's Elevate conference last October, Delta managing director of global distribution strategy Jeff Lobl predicted that by October 2019, "There will be a growing realization across the distribution chain, from airlines to intermediaries to agencies to customers, that there is a lot more value in Next Generation Storefront than in NDC." NGS has gained real-world traction since Lobl said that, and it's still evolving, too. But travel buyers are on the hook to adapt their policies and programs along the way or lose control of their air spend.