Beyond the Intermediary? Airline Distribution, Modern Retailing and the Corporate Reality

This panel session at ITB Berlin 2026, moderated by Claudia Unger, brings together Ben Park (Global Travel Manager at Parexel, a clinical research company) and Heinrich Lange (Digital Retailing lead in the Sales and Distribution organization of Lufthansa Group) to dissect the real-world friction and progress in modern airline distribution — specifically NDC and Modern Retailing — from both a corporate buyer and airline supplier perspective.

The session opens with a framing of the current distribution moment: Ben calls it a 'revolution' driven by AI and new entrants, while Heinrich prefers 'accelerated evolution,' noting that Lufthansa has been deliberate about each step over the past decade but has seen clear acceleration in the corporate segment over the last 12–18 months.

On content and shopping availability, both speakers agree that 90% of the pipe-level challenge is solved. Parexel now operates 33 additional NDC content pipelines across 17 countries, and the bottleneck has shifted from connection to display management — fair duplication issues, unreadable fare rules, and complex new bundles that don't render cleanly in booking tools.

Servicing emerges as the single biggest unresolved pain point. Ben describes a shift from servicing being a rare 1–2% edge case to a 'week-by-week IROPS' reality since January, where a recent US winter storm had travel agents on the phone for two hours because promised NDC technical workflows failed across multiple airlines simultaneously. The core tension: better content and lower fares, but at the cost of broken automated servicing when disruption occurs — creating manual fallback at scale and measurable additional cost per NDC ticket that Parexel is now trying to quantify commercially with its TMC.

Heinrich counters with Lufthansa's 'hybrid servicing' approach: using NDC 17.2 for booking (which works) and rolling out servicing automations from NDC version 24.1 with key partners, some of whom report 70% efficiency gains in operational teams from eliminating manual interventions. The medium-term goal is omni-channel servicing — allowing a traveler to service a TMC-booked ticket via the airline app while keeping the TMC and corporate risk management systems in sync in real time. Ben endorses the vision but notes the industry is not yet there and that unresolved 'who is in control of the ticket' commercial questions remain.

On payment, Ben highlights a foundational mismatch: some airlines built their NDC payment flows for leisure (individual credit cards, CVC requirements) without understanding that corporates use central lodge cards and virtual card infrastructure. Data quality is deteriorating as NDC adoption rises — reference data fields are not mapped consistently, risk management data feeds are disrupted, and the direction of data quality is 'only going one way, unfortunately.'

A significant portion of the discussion addresses ecosystem fragmentation. Ben observes that the search-book-pay-report stack is so fragmented that new-generation TMCs like Navan and Spotnana are gaining ground precisely because they control the full stack (OBT, mid-back office, reporting) in a way legacy TMCs cannot. He also singles out the Mastercard/Concur move as another attempt to achieve the same vertical control. Heinrich acknowledges the airline's responsibility to engage more deeply at the point-of-purchase management level, noting that even after an NDC connection is live 'a lot of the work actually starts then.' Ben adds a sharp critique: Lufthansa's own product teams had never spoken to major OBT providers before he asked them — a structural 'missing link' between product design and distribution reality.

Both panelists agree that servicing will improve fastest and is the non-negotiable unlock; payment and reporting will take longer; and coordination is a permanent evergreen, not a one-time project. Ben's closing one-word challenge to the industry is 'value' — demanding clarity on whether modern retailing is genuinely about personalization or just a commercial power play. Heinrich's closing message to corporate buyers is blunt: 'The train has left the station. NDC is the leading technology in indirect distribution already. Work with us and be on that train.'