For a decade, corporate travel was promised that NDC would kill the middleman — airlines selling direct, rich content, no more GDS toll booths, no more stale fares. That promise looks real based on the top-line numbers: NDC adoption has climbed sharply since IATA introduced the standard, and corporate volumes are compounding quickly. So why does NDC still feel unfinished to most travel managers? Because growth at the industry level and NDC corporate readiness inside a given program are two very different things — and the gap between them is the real story. NDC didn’t kill the middleman. It just gave the role new branding.
The Growth Is Real. Corporate Readiness Isn’t.
NDC’s headline growth number is real, but it hides two stories moving at different speeds. Airlines and leisure agencies have raced ahead — Europe leads adoption, and leisure bookings run well past corporate ones. Corporate travel is stuck, and not because airlines haven’t built the capability — it’s what sits between the airline and the traveler: the TMC and the booking tool. Ask most travel managers what’s blocking them, and the airline is rarely the answer — it’s a TMC that admits it can’t properly support NDC, an OBT with only partial content, and a service desk that can’t make a simple change without extra manual work. GBTA’s research confirms this at scale: more than half of travel managers point to their TMC as the blocker, and self-service NDC servicing is close to nonexistent industry-wide. Where a platform has solved this — SAP Concur is the clearest example — adoption is moving fast, crossing a million NDC bookings within a year. Where it hasn’t, more than a third of corporate programs haven’t made a single NDC booking.
Where the Old Middleman Problem Still Lives
NDC’s promise was that airlines would bypass Global Distribution Systems built around decades-old IATA standards. Instead, connections proliferated — airlines built their own NDC APIs, each with different quirks, forcing TMCs and OBTs into separate integrations per carrier, per market, per version. The GDSs, rather than fading, pivoted into NDC aggregators themselves; Sabre and Amadeus now sit squarely in the flow, exactly where critics said intermediaries shouldn’t be. New aggregators have emerged to fill gaps, charging fees for unifying content NDC was meant to make directly accessible. Large enterprise accounts have leverage to negotiate around this; mid-market and SME buyers largely don’t.
MCP Enters the Frame
Just as the industry reckons with NDC fragmentation, a second standard enters the conversation: MCP (Model Context Protocol). Trade press frames NDC as “a dictionary” for airline content and MCP as “a translator” for AI agents — different layers, not competitors. TPConnects has already folded MCP into its Astra NDC platform, positioning it as a connector across NDC’s fragmented versions rather than a replacement — debated at the UATP-hosted Airline Distribution 2026 conference.
My Take: Why the Hotel Playbook Won’t Repeat Here
I’ve watched a nearly identical fight play out in hotel distribution, and the instinct is to assume airlines follow the same script — OTA-as-aggregator wins, GDS fades further. I don’t think that’s what happens here.
In hotels, OTAs built something GDS never had: richer content. Booking.com and Expedia invested directly in property-level content that GDS hotel data couldn’t match — GDS became the fallback, not the primary source. Airlines are structurally different. Airline-side OTAs mostly resell GDS content rather than originate it; outside a handful of LCCs selling direct, they’ve never built the content advantage over GDS that hotel OTAs did. That’s why I think the Big Three — Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, still clearing more than 90% of indirect bookings — have a real shot at becoming the true NDC aggregator, not a bypassed relic of one. Travelport is already positioning itself around aggregating fragmented NDC content, and that’s not incidental.
There’s another piece of incumbency worth naming: corporate negotiated fares have long lived inside the GDS as private, contracted fares tied to a company’s account — the actual commercial relationship, not just a technical connection. NDC hasn’t solved how to carry that over cleanly; airlines still need a separate agreement with each corporate or TMC to expose negotiated content, much like private fares work in GDS today. The GDS isn’t just first in line technically. It’s already holding the contracts.
No corporate program or TMC is going to hand-build 50-plus separate integrations — NDC today or MCP tomorrow. They need a single intermediary, which is why I don’t see MCP as the next big architecture fight for corporate travel specifically. My bet: that intermediary is the reinvented GDS, not the OTA and not a new pure-play aggregator, because the GDS already owns the relationships, workflows, and contracts airline OTAs never built. Corporates will keep routing through a TMC, and the TMC through whichever GDS wins the aggregation game, regardless of the acronym on top. A third-party aggregator could still carve a niche among agencies without GDS relationships, but I wouldn’t bet on it displacing the GDS as the corporate default. Which is why I’d tell any travel manager being pitched an MCP roadmap this year to ask a blunter question first: has my program even solved NDC? If the answer involves the 54% who say their TMC can’t support it, a second standard is premature.
Rajeev Goswami is CEO of WWStay and a member of the GBTA Technology Committee.
Sources
- NDC Crosses 1-in-5 Agency Bookings as Corporate Travel Joins the Mainstream — Travel Distribution News
- Achieving the Perfect Business Trip — GBTA (with Direct Travel, Spotnana, Troop)
- SAP Concur Gears Up for Sharp Rise in NDC Bookings — The Business Travel Magazine
- MCP vs. NDC and Other Challenges Facing Airline Distribution — PhocusWire
- Reframing Travel Plumbing: NDC, MCP as Tech Stack Allies — PhocusWire
- TPConnects Adds MCP Layer to NDC Platform — Business Travel News
- GDS System: Major Providers and Market Share — Software.travel
- Travel Technology for Dummies: What Is NDC? — Travel Industry Blog
- What is NDC (New Distribution Capability)? — Navan
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