How is the direct-to-consumer trend impacting the travel shopping experience?

Modern retailing, at its heart, is about customer centricity — not distribution. But in recent years there’s been so much of a focus on “who reaches which customers and how” that it’s come at the expense of the traveler experience.

Travelport’s new research investigates how the inconsistent implementation of the NDC “standard” is affecting customers and how the direct selling trend makes it harder for everyone to evaluate options and make a confident, satisfying choice. 

The consumer research-backed piece covers:

• What the direct-to-consumer (DTC) trend means for travel
• Why agencies are asking is NDC a trojan horse for DTC
• How consumers are experiencing the real impact of NDC
• Travel consumers biggest concerns
• New tools to help agents combat the growing volume of travel choices

Here's a preview of the findings...

By cutting out third parties, NDC is making it harder to compare travel choices.

DTC aims to cut out third parties in the hope of cutting distribution costs, building direct connections with customers and getting access to more data.

NDC, the supply-side model from the airlines, wants largely the same things. But this has presented significant technical challenges, and the net result is that it’s now more complicated than ever for people to comparing travel products like for like. And, it has equally exploded the number of airline offers, from 500 products in 2010 to 10,000 in 2024.

So it’s not surprising that today most people (56%) find flight options more and more complex and difficult to understand than ever before, and 80% say searching and comparing them is very time consuming.

Is NDC a trojan horse for DTC?

That's the question agencies are asking. Because while NDC promises more in the way of personalization, the research revealed consumers do not feel that is materializing for them.

It seems to be more about giving airlines greater control of the indirect distribution channel, while also growing DTC, because 42% of buyers don’t believe they’re actually seeing any customized travel offers.

Travelers want more clarity and a better shopping experience

As a result, today’s travelers are now spending over four hours planning a trip and even after all that hard work, many are still not confident they’ve got the best deal.

Travelport’s research found they’re overwhelmed by the volume of options, but at the same time, they’re still suspicious that they’re not seeing absolutely everything. And that presents the industry with a big challenge — too much choice is a bad thing, but not seeing everything creates a feeling of FOMO, or worse, mistrust.

They’re also concerned about a lot of things, from the cost of cancellations and refunds (45%), to luggage penalties (42%) and seat allocation (37%). Modern retailing is about making all these NDC-related challenges easier for them.

Getting the distribution balance right

Brands should seek to get the right balance between direct and indirect selling and know how to get the best out of each and every channel. Direct to consumer or NDC can be a part of your distribution strategy, but history has proved retailers aren’t going anywhere either.

Armed with better tools, many are coming up with innovative ways to compete with direct sellers. For example, OTAs like eDreams are changing their business model to be less transactional and build loyalty through a subscription model. At the end of the day, each brand can tweak its options to get the best results, all the while asking: how does this impact the consumer?

Through Travelport’s new Content Curation Layer and Content Optimizer, it’s possible to optimize for both demand and supply sides. This latest platform enhancement unlocks smarter, faster searches with clearer and more standardized results from all sources (air, low cost carrier, NDC, ancillaries, hotel, car, rail, cruise), all in one platform. That way, agents get more control, earn more and automate more, through a user interface that’s clean, easy to use and offers everyone a more valuable experience. This is the role of all marketplace technologies, from ad tech to fintech to travel tech.

We’re now in a new, multi-source content world where retailers and retailing tech are needed more than ever to manage all the different content options out there. As a travel tech third party, Travelport is supporting agencies by bringing all content types together and standardizing them using AI and machine learning, so agents can compare apples to oranges in an apple-to-apples way.