- Riyadh Air is live; as the world’s first fully native Offer and Order airline, answering a decade of structural questions about whether this transition was ever achievable.
- The conditions for moving are better now than they have ever been — and potentially better than they will be, once the next wave of decisions has been made.
- McKinsey’s research across large IT programs shows that adopting a modular, multi-vendor approach delivers results at higher velocity and significantly reduces risk.
- Four principles: commercial sovereignty, open architecture, end-to-end process focus, and flexibility in transition, separate the programs that strengthen an airline’s position from the ones that simply recreate the constraints and dependencies they were trying to escape.
I have spent most of my airline career – at easyJet, Travelport, and SAP – working to make modern airline retailing a reality. And while working toward that end, I would encounter smart people asking the same recurring questions.
I recall a discussion on stage with Sebastien Touraine from IATA at the World Retailing Symposium 2018, and he asked me why airlines need to be so much more complicated than retailers? And was the challenge that airlines faced, transitioning to Orders, a technical or a commercial one?
Could an Offer and Order airline actually operate without PNRs, tickets and RBDs, within the broader industry: interlining, distributing through the Global Distribution System (GDS), using existing Departure Control System (DCS) infrastructure?
Would modularity hold up in practice, not just in an architecture diagram? The practical job of getting so many vendors to work together seemed, to some, too much risk.
And, candidly, I might have retired before these questions were resolved. When I joined Travelport, they had just finished a 10-year project to digitize the paper coupon! A transformation like this felt like it could take an exceptionally long time.
These are fears which can kill a project before it starts. And sometimes, with projects like that, the only way to kill the fear is to start.
Riyadh Air, the world’s first fully native Offer and Order airline, resolved those fears.. Live, processing real orders without a PSS, and going from announcement to production in only 18 months. Interlining with traditional, non-Offer & Order airlines. Distribution into legacy based GDSs. And multiple vendors collaborating to build the best-in-class ecosystem that Riyadh Air chose to suit their vision.
The modularity approach of the Riyadh Air story may be the single most important learning to the rest of us, those thinking about how to transition a well established carrier to an Offer & Order future. The inclination, when faced with this kind of complexity, is to simplify. Fewer parts, fewer points of collaboration, fewer…perhaps just one…vendors.
We’re not the only industry who faces this choice. Fortunately, others have done the expensive work of learning that this inclination toward simplicity is not the right solution here. McKinsey’s study of more than 5,400 large-scale IT programs found they run 45% over budget and deliver 56% less value than projected.*
The organizations that beat those odds did not consolidate around a single vendor. They diversified — adopting a stable of smaller partners in focused workstreams, achieving more than threefold improvements in delivery velocity. Under pressure, the instinct is to simplify. The data says that instinct makes things worse. Modularity is the key component to derisking large projects, and delivering the right solution for your airline in the process.
Four principles that determine whether transformation succeeds
The Singapore Airlines A350 that flew me to Singapore in March, was assembled in Toulouse, France. Airbus operates a decentralized network of more than 1,500 suppliers across 30 countries — wings from the UK, fuselage from Germany, tail sections from Spain. Every component is designed to fit as specified, without custom adaptation. It is considered one of the safest aircraft ever assembled.
Modularity is the most powerful tool available for managing the complexity of building something this significant. It is also the most effective way to de-risk airline transformation and keep commercial control where it belongs, with the airline. From our experience at FLYR in delivering these programs, four principles stand out as the best way to mitigate risk:
Commercial sovereignty: align financial structure with intended architecture
Perhaps the most important concept here because lower upfront costs are not always what they appear. As Richard Clarke of T2RL has written, ‘commercial incentives shape architecture’. Such as simple, yet powerful statement. A lower headline price may obscure additional charges for API calls or management of connectivity, forcing the adoption of workarounds that undermine system integrity. The financial structure of the deal ends up distorting the architecture you were trying to build.
High-performing organizations take a broader view from the start. They align commercial terms with long-term performance, transparency, and collaborative outcomes — rather than optimizing for unit price. The question to ask of any vendor agreement is not just what it costs to start, but what it costs to change, and what options would we have to exit. If the answer is unclear, that is itself a signal worth taking seriously.
Open architecture: treat standards compliance as non-negotiable, not a preference
True modularity means components from different vendors integrate according to agreed standards — without custom adaptation. Modularity requires many different components, from several vendors, that deliver the overall capability. Just like the Airbus construction in Toulouse, they need to fit together as designed, following the standards. You must avoid building bespoke integrations as you assemble the final solution. Otherwise you lose modularity from day one.
Strict adherence to standards must be a contractual condition, not a preference expressed during procurement and quietly negotiated away during delivery. Once bespoke integrations become the norm in a program, flexibility and scalability erode quickly — and the leverage that open architecture was supposed to preserve disappears with them.
End-to-end process focus: manage the full workflow, not just the individual components
Even a straightforward business process touches multiple systems across multiple vendors. A schedule change, for example, can pass through three separate vendor systems: Network Planning, Schedule Builder, and Stock Keeper. When each vendor is accountable only for their own component and their own service level agreement (SLA), the gaps between those components become the places where problems hide and accountability disappears.
A successful transformation requires someone maintaining focus on the full end-to-end process throughout. For complex programs, contracting a Master Systems Integrator to manage cross-vendor dependencies and integration risk provides security — managing modularity risk and dependencies through cross-vendor integration testing. The operational practices matter just as much as governance structure. Our learnings from Riyadh Air were clear: joint, in-person workshops are the most effective means to reach decisions. Common requirements and shared definitions of done prevent misalignment between teams. And structured change control — specifically for requirements, designs, and API contracts — is not bureaucratic overhead. It is the mechanism by which alignment and consistency are maintained when the program is under pressure. And it will be.
Flexibility in transition: hybrid operations are not a failure state
The temptation to plan for a clean cutover — old architecture on one side of a defined date, new architecture on the other — is understandable. It rarely reflects reality. We all accept there will be a period of hybrid running during transition. But the target architecture for when the PSS is decommissioned does not have to be the end state.
If a channel is performing, leave it until after the heavy lifting is complete. For example, if NDC is working and stable, but your end-state architecture delivers a change in offer management to a new vendor module, consider leaving NDC until after the higher-risk phases, such as ticket and PSS decommissioning are complete. Then make your final architectural transitions to end state.
The more useful frame is risk-based: identify the risk profile for each channel and service component, maintain a risk limit for each transition phase, and manage the migration in small stages rather than a few larger events. Programs structured this way reduce disruption, preserve operational continuity, and give the organization real evidence of progress before committing to the most complex stages.
The hard work of proving it is possible has been done. It’s time to build.
We are genuinely at the beginning of one of the most significant transitions this industry will go through. The structural risks that made early adoption genuinely hazardous — the unresolved questions about compatibility, multi-vendor operability, and whether any of this could work at full-service scale within the existing industry infrastructure — have been answered. Riyadh Air is operating as proof.
The question now is not whether Offer and Order works. It does. The question is how each airline approaches the transition, and whether they structure it in a way that genuinely improves their position — or that simply trades one set of constraints for another.
The window is open. The conditions are right. How you move through it, determines what you find on the other side.
*Source: McKinsey & Company, “Delivering Large-Scale IT Projects on Time, on Budget, and on Value,” October 1, 2012, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/delivering-large-scale-it-projects-on-time-on-budget-and-on-value.
Andy Kidd is Chief Commercial Officer at FLYR. He has spent more than two decades in airline technology, including roles at easyJet, Travelport, and SAP, where he led go-to-market strategy for order accounting and settlement and delivered the first certified order management system, legacy translator proof of concept and worked with IATA since 2017 on the development and commercial adoption of the ONE Order standard.
