Five questions decide every distribution structure: who constructs the offer, who computes the price, who controls availability, who holds the order, and who granted the permission.
Most channel problems turn out to be one of those five with no owner.
What I usually get asked
- Our GDS agreement is up for renewal and we cannot tell whether the deal is good.
- NDC works until someone changes a booking.
- We cannot say what a booking actually costs us, channel by channel, after everything nets off.
- Should we build direct API distribution, or is that a distraction from something that matters more?
- An OTA wants a direct connect. Is that a threat or a channel?
Five different questions with one thing in common. The answer usually depends on numbers the airline already has and has never assembled in one place.
What I look at
- Effective net GDS cost per booking, by market and booking type, after discounts, incentives and surcharge recoveries. Not list rates, and not the vendor's version.
- Content commitments and parity clauses, with their exceptions inventoried, and a named owner for each.
- Agency sales at risk at seasonal peak, by market, with concentration in the top agents made explicit.
- ADM issuance, dispute and recovery rates, read as a yield lever rather than as an administrative cost.
- Prorate and interline leakage, and whether special prorate agreements still match traffic reality.
- The direct channel's true cost, including the acquisition spend that the bypass argument tends to leave out.
- NDC and the order transformation, judged on servicing rather than on booking share. A channel that cannot handle a change easily is not the same as a channel that works.
- Agent-channel readiness: whether machine-readable content and credentialing exist, and who owns the question of what share of your bookings software will make next year.
That list is not improvised. It is the 30-point Distribution Strategy Audit from my book, and it is free below.
How the work runs
A review. Two to four weeks. I read the contracts and the data, run the audit with your team, and come back with what distribution actually costs you, what is at risk, and the three things I would change first. Written, sourced, and short enough that people read it.
A negotiation. Running alongside a GDS, aggregator or partner renewal. I build the comparison you need before the meeting, which is rarely the comparison the vendor supplies, and stay in it until the deal is signed.
Standing advice. A few hours a month, for teams who mostly need to test a decision against someone who is not selling them the answer.
What you get
Numbers you can defend in front of a board, with a source and a date attached to every one. That is the same standard I hold my writing to, and it is the whole reason this is worth paying for: anyone can assert a distribution cost, almost nobody will show you where it came from.
What this is not
I do not do implementation, and I do not resell anyone's software. If you need a vendor selection run to a scorecard, there are people who are better at that and cheaper.
I am useful when the question is commercial, when the honest answer costs somebody a sale, and when you need someone who has sat on the other side of the table.
Where to start
The 30-point audit is the same list I work from, and it is free. Score it yourself first. The zeros are the useful part: an item you cannot answer is not a low score, it is an unowned question.