NEW DISTRIBUTION CAPABILITY AND COMPETITION 599 The new standard is intended to shift the passengers’ focus from price to value by using historical data based on previous bookings to create highly personalized offers44. As one commentator summarised: “The core element is called Dynamic Airline Shopping (DAS), which will be combined with an Application Programme Interface (API)…a shopping basket concept allowing the consumer to add or remove items from their basket as he chooses”45. This is new in the aviation world, but not to anyone who has already used Amazon, for example. In the DOT application, IATA contended that Resolution 787 meets the public interest test because updating the current technical standard to an XML standard will help modernise air travel shopping46. IATA further contended that the adoption of the standard will allow greater competition in the air transport distribution marketplace by letting third-party technology providers to develop methods outside the current distribution system. It is clear from the Order that approved Resolution 787 that airlines are seeking to further disrupt an oligopoly embodied by GDSs. Airlines supporting IATA’s request claimed that the new standard has the potential to improve comparison shopping, by supporting a distribution system that aggregates content from multiple sources. There is scope for cynicism regarding this argument. It is hard to seewhy airlines would support the further commoditisation of their product. Other proponents of the agreement pointed out that the new standard would create potential for increased competition in the technology sector, ‘which is currently dominated by three GDSs’47. NDC, however, entails another kind of shift in the current structure of information distribution, and not just from one standard to another48. When not engaged in direct sales, airlines send offers to CRSs for publication by travel agents. With NDC, ‘the offer is not published via CRS then requested by stakeholders, but must be requested by the airline first’, presumably by passengers via third parties, by creating digital platforms with the new standard49. 44 Katja Henen Brecke and Ulrich Steppler, “IATA’s New Distribution Capabilities (NDC): A Revolution (2013) 38 Air & Space L 487 (hereinafter ‘Brecke & Steppler’). 45 Brecke & Steppler at 489. 46 DOT Order to Show Cause at 2. 47 DOT Order to Show Cause at 4. 48 Brecke & Steppler at 488-9. 49 Brecke & Steppler at 489.
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