No single vendor should decide your airline's destiny.
When there is only one vendor
Market dominance has pros and cons. Where the DCS (Departure Control) market now finds itself is that airlines don’t tend to look beyond a single market-dominant vendor. That solution is modular but only within the walled garden of a single ecosystem.
API access and ongoing usage are commercially gated. So the walled garden has a gate. But getting through that gate requires a stakeholder who has both the influence, grit and budget to battle internally for resources to keep any integration project alive.
The upside of dealing with a single vendor is that extending functionality is only a Work Order away. But customers face timelines that they can neither control nor influence. Project delivery is often limited by the capacity of the most constrained vendor. When there is only one vendor, this hard ceiling is low. Modules from the same provider work better together. How much incentive is there for a dominant vendor to get [competing] external modules to work as well or at all?
An alternative to market dominance
Modularity offers an alternative to market dominance. But it has to be implemented one carrier at a time. One PSS contract at a time. Sure, each additional system results in an increasingly intricate tapestry of integrations. To outsource this complexity and lower costs, a modular architecture with the same vendor isn’t a solution. The solution is to create an integration plan, work with experienced partners, use reliable middleware, and standardise your data.A single supplier shouldn’t determine when, how and what you do because it holds and holds your inventory.
Innovative systems and vendors can change the way your company works. Don’t make those companies navigate an assault course shaped by a rigid procurement approach, only to run into a brick wall.
Airlines can dare to think of a day when their front-of-house and back-end systems move at the pace they determine. And they have the flexibility to move beyond a monolithic, decades-old tech stack optimised for mainframes to one that moves at the SPEED their business demands. But the tech is not the main problem…
Freedom within boundaries is not true freedom. It is latitude.
Recognise your lock-in contract for what it is – an instrument to keep control of your company's data and forcibly remain at the core of your company's processes. Find ways to innovate around it. Seek out vendors who can abstract around PNRs. Offer/Order is not the only way, but it should be at the centre of a future data model.
Begin a transformation program that sets your company on a path to freedom, not a procurement process that leads you straight back into the same walled garden.
If you are not content with your current reality, be ready to consider alternatives.
Agentic AI connects to back-end services to get things done. The data structure and message versions don't matter nearly as much as traditional development. Experiment with it. Focus on guest experience and work with rapid integrators that can decouple systems from legacy. Stakeholders are reaching out to us when they realise that Departure Control and Service Delivery that replace it are vital to protect their operations during transition because Ink is already doing Delivery Management in Production. We are here to guide anyone who craves freedom.
But before that... you have to want to be free.
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