The airline sector was urged to speed up the pace of New Distribution Capability adoption by Finnair, an airline that is pioneering the shift from legacy EDIFACT fare filing.

Jenni Soumela, the carrier’s vice president global sales and travel management, was speaking to delegates at the Amadeus Altitude25 conference in Lisbon about a project that saw it take all of its domestic itineraries off EDIFACT and on to IATA’s NDC standard last year.

“I have a dream, it’s one day we no longer need to talk about NDC,” she said. “It’s only an enabler, it does not deliver any real value to the end customer as such. It’s only good for what we use it for; bringing customers flexibility and choice.”

NDC was first proposed by airline industry body IATA over a decade ago, but wrangling over its implementation and potential impact on indirect travel agent sellers saw its development and adoption stall despite being seen as essential to the transition to modern digital retailing.

One of the biggest sticking points has been the ability for corporate bookers to service NDC ticketing post sale meaning it has only seen significant uptake in the leisure market.

Finnair worked in collaboration with leading Travel Management Company CWT on the domestic roll out in Finland.

Ian Davies, vice president global supplier management for EMEA at CWT, said the project required a lot of “Sisu”, a Finish term meaning grit and determination.

“There were not really any silver bullets here,” he said. “There’s no secrets as such, there’s just a lot of hard work.”

Davies said the project required getting alignment and collaboration with Finnair and all the other critical partners in the market like the online booking tools its clients use and payments platforms.

“When we looked at the Finish market there were some structural components which meant we had the confidence to invest and deliver here.

“By luck or coincidence the vast majority of our customers were using Amadeus to obtain content and Amadeus Cytric as a booking tool. We had the confidence we could scale quickly.”

By the middle of the first quarter of last year CWT ensured 90% of its customers were able to access NDC content and since it has processed a six figure sum of NDC segments driving the highest level of adoption in the world.

Soumela said the carrier had a “super sharp focus” on the clear goal of getting the NDC migration done. “There were no free presents available in this exercise even though we are the official airline of Santa Claus.”

And she added: “As an industry we really need to speed up [adoption of NDC]. That’s the challenge I would like to set.”