Lufthansa is testing a 24-hour NDC price hold for business travel
From 1 October, the Lufthansa Group is testing a model that could solve a very practical problem in corporate NDC booking: what happens to the fare while a booking is awaiting internal approval. An acceptable fare will be able to be held for 24 hours, provided the booking contains a valid Corporate Location Identifier, or CLID.
The mechanism is simple. A traveller or TMC finds a suitable flight and price via NDC, and Lufthansa then holds it for the next 24 hours. This leaves the company time for travel approval without having to check again a few hours later whether the same fare is still available. The pilot runs until 18 January 2027.
The problem isn't the speed of the NDC, but the speed of the company
Right there, Lufthansa is opening up a more interesting topic than the price guarantee itself.
NDC enables airlines to create more dynamic offers and prices in almost real time. Lufthansa, for example, already offers Continuous Pricing through its NDC, corporate fares linked to CLID, as well as ancillary products and services.
Corporate purchasing, however, does not work in real time.
A fare found at 9 o'clock may wait for approval from a supervisor, budget holder or travel manager for a few hours. When the approval arrives, the offer the traveller initially saw may no longer exist.
Traditional distribution and tariff processes often made that time gap less noticeable. With the shift to more dynamic NDC offers, the difference between the speed of airline retailing and the speed of the corporate approval process has become much more obvious. Lufthansa is now trying to bridge that exact gap.
The pilot will show whether this is a real obstacle to the NDC
The programme will not cover all bookings. Economy Basic fares on European routes, flights to and from Japan, and journeys starting in China are excluded. Lufthansa also stresses that corporate clients should check whether the NDC of their agency or technology partner is truly activated and operational, as technical connectivity in itself does not mean that all functionalities are available.
The company is calling this a pilot for now, rather than a permanent product. During the test period, it will monitor usage, commercial results and partner feedback before deciding whether to potentially continue or expand the model.
That is why the result of the experiment is of interest to TMCs.
If 24-hour price holding leads to a higher number of corporate bookings through NDC, that would be a good signal that at least part of the slower adoption of NDC was related to the design of the booking process, and not to fundamental resistance from the corporate market towards the new distribution model.
If customer behaviour does not change significantly, the problem is likely broader. Then the gap between real-time airline retailing and the way large corporations approve and purchase travel will not be something that can be resolved merely by a longer price-hold period.
