Beyond Content: Our New Platform to Power the Next Generation of Airline Retailing

As we gather for GBTA this week, I find myself reflecting on a universal industry truth: business travel is beautifully, maddeningly complex.

Meetings end early and you need to catch an earlier flight. Negotiations stall and you suddenly need to stay another night. A storm on the East Coast throws thousands of travel plans into chaos. That’s the reality for your travelers, every single day.

I had my own taste of this a couple of months ago. Flying back from Chicago, I watched Newark airport melt down on the news. But instead of facing a support line, my airline’s NDC implementation had automatically applied a travel waiver, letting me rebook myself onto a new flight at zero cost on the Navan app, right from my phone. It was seamless.

This is the promise of modern travel. But that promise is incredibly difficult to deliver consistently, especially in corporate travel, where you have another layer of complexity: policy controls, duty of care, unused ticket management, and reporting. Multiply that by 10,000 travelers or more, depending on your company, and you have the massive challenge that every travel manager and TMC faces.

The Industry’s First Step: Chasing the Content

When NDC (New Distribution Capability) first entered the scene, the industry-wide conversation was dominated by a single fear: content fragmentation and price disparity. The prevailing narrative was, "We need to get this content or our customers will miss out on the best prices." The entire focus was on the sell.

Servicing — the much harder part of the equation — was often an afterthought. The assumption was that we could just throw more people at the problem. Human agents would catch the errors, manually process schedule changes, and fix the breaks in the technology.

But this approach missed the real prize. The true potential of NDC was never just about access to different fares; it was about creating a fundamentally better end-to-end experience.

Our Path: A Commitment to Quality Over Legacy

At Navan, our DNA is to build online-first experiences, and we are unflinching when it comes to the quality of that experience. From the beginning, we knew there wasn't a single silver bullet for NDC. So, we experimented. We built direct connections with airlines, we partnered with a tech-forward aggregator, and we integrated with a legacy GDS’s NDC offering. We’ve spent years learning the strengths and weaknesses of every model.

This commitment to quality recently even led us to a tough but necessary decision: turning off our GDS connection for NDC, choosing instead to focus on our direct integrations that meet our high quality standards. With direct, scalable connections to airlines, you can debug issues and build solutions together in hours or days, not the months-long development cycles you face with an intermediary.

Announcing a New Foundation for Innovation

While NDC adoption is becoming mainstream, Navan is focused on what’s next. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that we have channeled years of learning into a new, proprietary content aggregation platform, engineered from the ground up to deliver the next generation of airline retailing for business travel.

This isn’t just another pipe for content. This is a strategic investment that fundamentally changes our ability to innovate. It allows us to:

• Build new airline direct connections with far less effort, using the latest, most capable versions of the NDC standard.
• Rapidly upgrade our existing connections to newer NDC versions that unlock superior servicing for complex scenarios like irregular operations and schedule changes.

We’re already seeing the results. We’ve just launched a new direct connection with Aegean and upgraded our Lufthansa Group integration to service bookings via the latest 24.1 NDC standard on this new platform. This is our commitment to better, more consistent servicing and end-to-end workflows, all while maintaining the seamless, online-first experience Navan is known for.

The Real-World Impact: From Chaos to Control

So, what does this actually mean for our customers? It means a smoother, more reliable end-to-end experience.

1. Everyday performance is better.

For routine changes, our success rate for in-app, self-service changes is higher with our direct NDC connections than with legacy EDIFACT (the standard for electronic data interchange that NDC is replacing). When a traveler does need to call an agent, their issue is resolved faster because the technology just works better.

2. Extraordinary scenarios are becoming ordinary.

This is where the magic happens. Take waivers, for instance.

• The Old Way (EDIFACT): A thunderstorm hits Dallas, and the airline issues a travel waiver. To use it, a traveler has to call an agent, wait on hold (with everyone else), and have the agent manually find the waiver code, override the pricing in the GDS (which is unaware of any waivers), and re-issue the ticket. It’s slow, manual, and prone to human error.
• The Navan Way (NDC on our platform): The airline automatically applies the waiver. The traveler gets a notification, opens their app, and if they search for alternate flights will see “$0 change” options. They rebook themselves in seconds with no human intervention. Multiple airlines have already made this work, and it’s where we see the industry converging as NDC matures.

We’re working hand-in-hand with our airline partners to perfect this. When a waiver doesn’t apply correctly, we don’t just open a ticket. We provide them with data and logs to solve the root cause, so it works the next time.

Built for the Future, Delivering Today

This new platform is architected for fast delivery at a consistently high quality bar. The previous generation of NDC (primarily versions 17.2, 18.1, and 18.2) had gaps that each airline solved differently, forcing us to build custom code for each carrier. The new 24.1 standard is far more uniform. Where individual airlines or IT providers filled in gaps, they came back together to standardize those approaches so that we all benefit from that consistency, both in quality and delivery velocity.

Our platform is built on a foundation of shared, standardized code for all 24.1 carriers. When we build a new feature, we build it once, and it benefits all airlines on that standard. This will allow us to innovate and onboard new airline partners faster than ever before. As NDC standards evolve, Navan will be ready to adopt them in days, not months, ensuring our customers are always the first to benefit.

This is where Navan stands out. While legacy TMCs are often forced to wait for their GDS to innovate, we are in the trenches, working directly with airlines to build the future of travel. When an airline makes a proposal for how to solve a real customer problem in a new, creative way, some TMCs raise their hands and say, “But how will that work in my GDS?” We’ve heard that line repeatedly. We’re on the other side of the room saying, “How quickly can you get us this API? Let’s move forward and innovate together to deliver value to our shared customers.”

We are years ahead because we’re not just connecting to NDC; we’re shaping what it can do. The broader industry will eventually benefit from the improvements we pioneer today. But our customers benefit first. And if we can help raise the bar for the entire industry, we all win. We’re just proud to be leading the way.