To Whom It May Concern:

I am Montie Brewer, I was the CEO of Air Canada from 2005 until 2009. I am writing to 

voice my support for IATA’s NDC Initiative and Resolution 787, for reasons elaborated 

below.

During my time at Air Canada, we transformed our approach to pricing. When I first 

arrived, like many other airlines, we were using high powered computers and 

sophisticated algorithms to determine when best to increase the selling fare to maximize 

the amount of revenue we could extract from the marketplace. This approach, though 

successful in the short term, in the long term it tended to commoditize the product. 

Our customers had differing needs and we were only offering one price regardless of 

their needs. We decided to create a transparent marketplace and offer our customers 

many different products, at differing price levels and let the customer decide which 

product best met their needs. Instead of offering one selling fare for a seat, we offered 

four different products, available all the time up, to the last seat on the aircraft. 

Each product had different restrictions and benefits. The lowest priced product was a 

Spartan offering, with no refund allowed, no frequent flyer points, no food, no seat 

assignment and so on. The highest priced product offered everything, food, seat 

assignment, refunds and so on. The products offered our customers different travel 

experiences even though they used the same seat on the aircraft. 

Our objective was to have two customers sitting next to each other on a flight and they 

compare the price they paid, and they are both happy. The customer who paid the 

higher fare could have purchased the lower fare, but the customer saw value in the 

higher priced product. 

In addition to our new “Branded Fares”, we also allowed the customer to add benefits to 

the fare product they purchased on an a la carte basis. This included paying for a seat 

assignment, travel insurance, lounge access and so on. The goal was to offer the 

customer lots of options and let them choose the best mix that met their needs.

To make this all work, we needed to make sure that the customer could see all the 

products, and their prices, when they were shopping for a flight. We needed a 

transparent marketplace. We were able to create this on the Air Canada website. Once 

a customer requested a flight they were offered all flight and product options displayed 

in a grid. This grid display has become common place on most airline websites today, 

but was a consumer-centric breakthrough back in 2003, ten years ago. 

The pricing change was a great success for Air Canada resulting in improvements in 

customer satisfaction and revenue. Over 40% of our customers were choosing a 
higher priced product and over 25% of the customers were adding an a la carte item to 

their purchase. They were doing so because they saw value in the differentiated 

products. Many of these products could only be found at the Air Canada website.

The biggest obstacle to the change in how we wanted sell our products were with our 

distribution partners, primarily the GDSs. Airlines have historically only focused on 

offering one fare for a seat at a time. The age old question, “what is the price to go to 

Orlando on Monday?” Distribution systems were designed to answer that question. 

They weren’t designed to answer the new questions the Air Canada customers were 

asking, “What travel options do I have to go to Orlando on Monday?” and “How can I 

easily customize my trip to my liking?”. It was critical for Air Canada customers to see 

all options at once, enabling them to find and select the product that best met their 

travel needs. However, there was a lot of friction with the distribution partners. They 

did not want to invest in changes to their systems to allow for display changes and a la 

carte purchases, and Air Canada was unwilling to distribute the new travel options 

through their systems unless they made the necessary changes. It was a stalemate, 

and the customer suffered for it. Consumers were not able to easily compare the 

products that Air Canada was offering with the other travel options offered by other 

airlines in the distribution systems used by most travel agents. The customer could do 

comparison shopping by going from website to website, and that is what they did. 

The optimal solution for the agent, customer and the Airline was to have a transparent 

marketplace that aggregates all products and educates the customer on the value of 

each product offered. In other industries there are very successful aggregation sites, 

Amazon for retail, Zillow for real estate, and Zappos for shoes. These sites not only 

offer different products, but they also educate the customer on the value of the 

differences between one product and another. Why hasn’t this happened in the air 

travel space? Sure, there are sites that aggregate travel options, like Expedia, but they 

are set up to answer the “what is the price to go to Orlando on Monday?” question. 

They don’t show all products and options available for the traveler. 

The customer and their agents are looking for a marketplace that aggregates all travel 

options and products, and airlines are looking for a marketplace where the customers 

can appreciate the value of the many different products they are offering for the same 

journey. They all want the same thing. This is an opportunity that a current distributor 

or a new distributor can take advantage of. It has been over ten years since this need 

has been established. Why has no one done it?

That is the question I have often asked myself. There is an opportunity in creating a 

new, very dynamic marketplace for travel that would make travel shopping a more 3D 

experience than the one dimensional experience it is today. For anyone to build such a 
marketplace where customers would like to shop, they have to have enough products to 

be interesting to the customer. Ideally they would have all products from all airlines. 

Having looked at this, there are a number of barriers that have slowed established 

distributors from doing this and have limited the ability of startups from entering the 

space. One being access to all of the airline's fares, seat availability, and the full array 

of product offerings. Another barrier is the need to standardize the data from the 

different airline systems. 

For these reasons, current distributors have been trying to get airlines to adopt new 

standards so they can more easily rework their systems to distribute the new products. 

For the startup, they have a number of options to gain access to airline products, fares 

and availability. The first option is they could contract with a current aggregator, like 

one of the GDS’s. The drawback here is that the GDS’s do not, cannot, distribute all of 

the products that airlines offer that customers may find interesting. This includes a la 

carte options, some bundled fares and airline pass products that some airlines offer. 

Another drawback is, if the start up is successful, they could be seen as a competitor to 

the GDS. 

Another option to gain access to all the airline’s products, fares and availability is to 

build a link directly to each airline’s reservation system. No simple task. Many 

investors see the opportunity in investing in companies that are interested in building a 

better marketplace and tools for agents. But they do not have the patience to wait out 

the amount of time it takes to get access to all the airline content. In practical terms, 

this is effectively a barrier of entry.

I applaud IATA’s NDC initiative. IATA’s newly proposed airline connectivity standard 

will potentially take away that time consuming process, eliminating one of the barriers of 

entry into this space. It will be easier for everyone, current distributors and new 

entrants, to gain access to the airline’s fares, products and availability and the data and 

connectivity will be standardized which will make it easier to aggregate multiple airline 

content. It will allow airlines to continue to produce new innovative products for the 

marketplace with the comfort that they will be distributed and presented in manner that 

will highlight their product's benefits to the consumer.

There has been a call for standardization for some time for the reasons stated above. It 

is a necessary step in allowing the industry to evolve to meet the changing needs of the 

traveling public. It should be approved to allow innovation to be brought to the 

marketplace.