AA will continue awarding miles regardless purchase path, will not publish a preferred agency list, is offering increased (temporary) incentives to book NDC and is putting most content back into EDIFACT. All good steps… but why isn’t any of the travel trade media asking AA about the future of AAdvantageBusiness? It hasn’t been covered in any article or LinkedIn post (save one reference from Jeff Klee).
Most coverage of Raja’s departure, Isom’s contrition and the policy changes by AA discuss what this means for NDC. In doing so, they miss the point that the AA strategy over the past 18 months wasn’t about NDC. It was about direct distribution and ownership of the customer, based largely on a flawed understanding of the role and influence of managedtravel. NDC was simply one of the tools used to achieve that direct strategy.
The industry has been so focused on NDC specifically that this episode played easily into the “NDC is flawed” narrative – which is simplistic at best and probably just wrong.
This brings us back to AAdvantage Business – the clearest evidence that NDC was a tool and not the endgame for AA. It would have been quite easy (even expected) that this program would apply in NDC channels when it was announced last fall, but it does not.
Looking forward, will the AA reconciliation project include changes to AAdvantage Business? If not, is it reasonable (or cynical) to view their recent actions as only a calculated, temporary tactic shift while still advancing toward a pre-existing strategy of direct distribution?
