The short answer: only if the tool your travellers book in, or the desktop your travel management company uses, has a live NDC connection to each airline you fly, with your corporate fare code loaded in that channel and changes and refunds working through it. Where it does not, the company pays a surcharge on every GDS ticket, from EUR 8 to EUR 23 at Lufthansa Group and USD 30 at Turkish Airlines, for a shrinking share of each airline’s content, and from 25 January 2027 it will not see Lufthansa’s cheapest fares from Germany to the United States at all. NDC, the airline industry’s standard for selling offers directly from the airline’s own system, has been talked about for a decade. The autumn of 2026 is when the fares started to move.
What Changed, and When
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January 2026 | Lufthansa Group’s distribution cost charge on GDS tickets rises to EUR 18.00 on Amadeus, EUR 22.50 on Sabre and EUR 23.00 on Travelport; an NDC booking made through the same GDS pays EUR 8.00 | Lufthansa Group via Touristik Aktuell |
| 1 May 2026 | Turkish Airlines charges USD 30 per ticket on GDS bookings; its NDC platform is exempt. Lufthansa raises the Amadeus charge again on 5 May | Turkish Airlines, Travel Distribution News |
| 1 July 2026 | Air Europa adds a distribution channel fee of EUR 12 one way and EUR 24 return per origin and destination, and withdraws its content from Sabre | Getaway, Travel Distribution News |
| September 2026 | Lufthansa Group guarantees an NDC fare for 24 hours after booking, for corporate customers whose booking carries a valid corporate identifier, until January 2027 | Lufthansa Group factsheet |
| 24 September 2026 | Delta reaffirms NDC through Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport before the end of 2026, with no GDS surcharge and no content withdrawn. Japan Airlines and Amadeus open NDC international tickets to agencies in 26 countries from 1 October (Japan) and 13 October (overseas) | Travel Distribution News, JAL and Amadeus |
| 15 October 2026 | ARC reports that NDC made up 21.2% of US travel agency transactions in September, from 1,264 agencies | ARC |
| 16 October 2026 | Ethiopian Airlines goes live on the AirGateway platform with shopping, ticketing, seats, ancillaries, refunds and rebookings through NDC | Ethiopian Airlines |
| 27 October 2026 | Lufthansa Group: from 25 January 2027, Economy Light fares without checked baggage from Germany to the United States, and the equivalent United and Air Canada Basic Economy fares, are sold only through NDC and the airlines’ websites, at every point of sale | Lufthansa Group factsheet |
How Much Is Moving
The airlines and the GDSs count differently, and the gap between their numbers is the reason for the surcharges. Lufthansa Group said in June 2026 that half of its indirect bookings now arrive through NDC and that 77.5% of all its bookings, counting its own websites, sit outside the traditional GDS channel. ARC’s settlement data for US agencies puts NDC at 21.2% of transactions in September 2026, against 16.5% in January 2025. Sabre told investors in August that NDC is about 5% of its distribution volume and that it earns less on each of those bookings than on a traditional one. The airline sees three quarters of its sales already on the new rails; the GDS still carries most of the corporate volume on the old ones; the surcharge is the airline’s way of moving the rest.
What It Means for a Corporate Travel Programme
- The content gap is now in writing. Lufthansa’s 27 October factsheet gives a date on which a fare family on a major corporate route leaves the GDS channel entirely. A traveller searching in a booking tool without NDC will see the next fare up and the programme will record the difference as compliance, not as cost.
- The surcharge lands on your invoice. At EUR 19 to 23 per Lufthansa Group ticket, USD 30 per Turkish ticket and EUR 24 per Air Europa return, a company with 1,000 European tickets a year on those carriers pays a five-figure sum for the booking channel alone.
- The corporate fare must live in the NDC channel. Lufthansa’s 24-hour price guarantee applies only when the booking carries the company’s corporate identifier. A negotiated fare loaded in the GDS and absent from the NDC connection is a saving the traveller cannot reach.
- Servicing is the real test. GBTA’s 2025 survey of 166 travel managers found that only 13% could change or cancel an NDC booking in their online booking tool, 26% said the tool lacked NDC content, 28% said their TMC could not support NDC, and 37% made no NDC bookings at all. BTN Europe’s survey of 115 European travel managers the same spring found 31% had missed savings because they could not reach certain content.
Where the Gulf and Pakistani Carriers Stand
| Airline | NDC content for agencies, and since when |
|---|---|
| Emirates | Amadeus from 2022 under an agreement that also removed its GDS surcharge on Amadeus bookings; Travelport from June 2024; Sabre from December 2024 |
| Qatar Airways | Amadeus from 2021 and Sabre from 2022; Travelport from March 2024, with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman among the first markets |
| Saudia | Sabre from January 2025, its first NDC content on a GDS; Amadeus from the first quarter of 2025 |
| Riyadh Air | Sabre as its first distribution partner from May 2025, NDC and traditional fares; Travelport from November 2025 with NDC as the primary connection |
| Etihad | Travelport, market by market; certified at IATA’s highest NDC level |
| Pakistan International Airlines | Certified at NDC Level 4 since October 2021; content reaches agencies through the GDSs |
Among the Gulf carriers only Emirates has used a GDS surcharge, introduced in July 2021 and lifted for Amadeus bookings in February 2022, and Delta has said it will not add one. The pattern elsewhere is the same as Lufthansa’s, only earlier in the cycle: content first, then a price difference, then a cheaper fare that exists in one channel only.
Six Checks for the Next Quarter
- Rank your airlines by spend and ask your TMC or booking tool vendor, in writing, which of them it connects to through NDC, through which channel, and what the booking can and cannot do afterwards.
- Load your corporate codes into every NDC connection, not only the GDS, and test that a booking with the code returns the negotiated fare and, at Lufthansa Group, the 24-hour guarantee.
- Price the channel, not the fare. Take last quarter’s tickets on Lufthansa Group, Turkish and Air Europa, add the surcharge each would have carried, and compare with the NDC price of the same itineraries.
- Test servicing before volume. Change a date, refund a ticket and handle an involuntary schedule change on an NDC booking, and record who did it and how long it took.
- Check where the data goes. An NDC booking that bypasses the GDS must still reach the expense system, the traveller tracking feed and the management reports; a booking the finance team cannot see is a booking the policy cannot govern.
- Set a review date. Lufthansa gave three months’ notice of the January change through a factsheet on a trade portal. Someone in the programme has to be reading those.
Where SBConnects fits. For a company that runs its own travel, Business Travel searches GDS, NDC and low-cost carrier content in one screen under the company’s policy, with corporate rates where its suppliers offer them, approvals automated and bookings connected to the HR and ERP systems; a company can keep its existing travel vendor or TMC and connect it. For a travel management company, Corporate Travel & Expense gives each corporate client a self-booking tool with its own supplier content, rule-based fares and markups, policies by grade and up to seven approval levels. Both sit on the API Gateway, one normalised API to more than 200 suppliers, including GDS, NDC and low-cost airline content with fallback between sources, where supplier version changes are handled on the gateway side rather than by your developers. SoftwareBiz sets SBConnects up with your contracted suppliers, trains your team and supports it after go-live, in one to eight weeks depending on configuration and modules.
What to Do This Quarter
Put the six checks to your TMC or tool vendor before the January change, and ask for the answers by airline rather than as a yes. The same question applies to the content an AI assistant can reach on your behalf, which our article on AI booking and travel agencies covers: only content that is connected through an API can be found, compared and booked, whoever or whatever is doing the searching.