News & Publications

Last week, at Travel In Motion's Modern Airline Retailing Impulse event at Lake Zürich, a week before Sabre declared #MCP the successor to #NDC, I had the chance to give a keynote and discuss Oystin's strategic view of the perfect storm which has formed for airline distribution and Modern Airline Retailing. During the discussion, when one of the participants, an influential voice at one of International Air Transport Association (IATA)'s MAR consortium airlines commented tha

Today's partnership announcement between Amadeus and Anthropic is an urgent call to action for airlines to take control of their distribution destiny. Airlines need offensive AND - just as importantly - defensive capabilities in the technical and contractual domain with respect to Agenti AI. In other words, airlines need to be able to play, without being played. Imagine Anthropic or an incarnation of Claude becoming "just another" GDS subscriber: Depending on the airline's di

Smaller airlines often believe their ability to negotiate competitive GDS distribution agreements is limited. In reality, their bargaining power is quite significant, because their BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) is usually not much worse than the negotiated deal they already have. This is because for small airlines, the relative increase in GDS booking fees when moving from a (Full) content agreement to a baseline GDS parity agreement with the likes of A

Air Europa and Sabre have agreed on distribution terms and conditions ensuring continued Sabre access to Air Europa content from 1 July 2026, albeit with the same surcharge as will be applicable to tickets issued via Sabre’s GDS competitors Amadeus and Travelport. Earlier this year, when informing the trade about its GDS cost recovery surcharge effective 1 July 2026, the airline had said it would cease distributing via Sabre from the same date onward.