624 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM The NDC initiative was formally launched in October 2012 when IATA member airlines approved Resolution 787, the foundational standard of NDC. This was followed, in August 2014, by the US Department of Transport’s approval of Resolution 787 (under the “Provisions for Conduct of IATA Traffic Conferences”, IATA is required to file any and all resolutions and agreements coming out of its various conferences with the US Dept. of Transportation). Following DOT approval, IATA delivered the first set of official standards in September 2015. The NDC standard enables an airline to make sales offers to travel agents directly in real time, and this will also permit airlines to both define and price their products in any way they wish. For customers, NDC will offer greater transparency and choice when shopping for trips, as it will address the growing gap between the vast content, upsell opportunities, personalised offers and additional products available on airline websites and the more commoditised travel options available through travel agents. NDC is a standard for API (Application Programming Interface) distribution. It is currently based upon XML, as this has been widely adopted and used across Internet airline distribution providers. In September 2018, with the release of standard version 18.2, JSON translation has been included. NDC started in a rapidly changing industry juncture and is going to contribute to align channels and provide transparent distribution. It will move the industry from system-centric processes to a real customer-centric retailing. 2. BACKGROUND: AIRLINE DISTRIBUTION Air tickets are typically sold in two ways–directly from the airline’s website (or via the airline’s reservations call centre, although this activity has declined dramatically over the years) or through the intermediation of CRSs (ComputerizedReservation Systems), also called GDS (Global Distribution Systems), which essentially collect from airlines the necessary data to provide an offer (such as schedules, price and availability) and present it to travel agencies, whether physical or web based. These systems were originally created by the airlines in the pre-Internet era, but they became totally independent from them a long time ago. Since then, many things have changed in the commercial aviation landscape. Airlines have been confronted with the low-cost phenomenon, which has triggered the unbundling of different services that now are often presented to
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