Airline Distribution Explained and Travel Payments Explained are published today, 6 October 2026.
They are the first two volumes of a series called Travel Industry Explained.
Why they exist
Both fields have the same problem. Almost everything written about them is written by someone with a commercial interest in them.
Standards bodies publish specifications, which is not the same thing as judgement. Vendors publish content marketing laid out like research. Consultancy work is commissioned, and that shapes what it concludes. And the practitioners who really know are mostly not allowed to publish anything at all.
So someone joining an airline commercial team today has no honest map. They learn distribution from a GDS training deck and payments from a provider's pitch. Ten years later they are running a function on a model somebody sold them.
These are the map I wanted when I started.
Airline Distribution Explained
Who is allowed to sell an airline ticket, through which pipe, at whose price, and for whose fee.
The book explains the whole machine from its economics: who does what, who pays whom, and why every player's behaviour is rational given its revenue. The GDS model and what it actually costs after discounts and surcharge recoveries. BSP and ARC explained as the credit system they really are. Third-party ticketing, interline and prorate leakage. The direct channel's true cost, including the marketing auctions the bypass speeches never mention. NDC judged honestly after a decade. Aggregators and metasearch. Corporate travel and content fragmentation. A complete money map with one booking priced through eight channels side by side. And where it is going: ONE Order, the retailing stack, and AI agents as a distribution channel.
Ends with a 30-point Distribution Strategy Audit.
Travel Payments Explained
Somewhere in every travel company there is a number that would horrify the board if anyone assembled it: the total cost, in fees, losses, leakage and lost sales, of simply getting paid.
Why travel payments differ from all other payments. Agency versus merchant model. BSP cash and card sales. Direct acquiring, interchange++, approval rates and the single-acquirer risk most merchants carry unpriced. Orchestration and the token portability question that decides your exit. Fraud and disputes, and why good travellers look like fraudsters. Alternative methods and bank rails. Virtual cards, and a five-move framework for dealing with them. FX, like-for-like settlement and an honest look at DCC. Refunds and disruption. Reconciliation and leakage. And agentic payments: what happens when the buyer is software.
Ends with a 40-point Travel Payments Health Check.
The two diagnostics, free
Both appendices are available here at no charge and without buying anything. They are the full versions from the books, not teasers.
The Distribution Strategy Audit is 30 items, maximum 60. Unaudited carriers typically score 20 to 35; a well-run distribution function scores above 48.
The Travel Payments Health Check is 40 items, maximum 80. A typical unaudited travel merchant scores 25 to 40; a well-run function scores above 65.
Every item is deliberately black and white. Either it is true, with a name and a number attached, or it is not. Where you cannot decide whether to give yourself the point, the answer is 0.
Both are on the diagnostics page, which has been live since 1 October:
montmessin.com/writing/the-two-diagnostics
The series
Travel Industry Explained is an open series. Distribution and payments came first because they are joined at the hip: every booking in the first book is paid for by the mechanics in the second, and the two functions are almost always run by people who do not talk to each other.
The third volume is finished. Airline Systems Explained comes out on 10 November and is on pre-order now: what airlines actually run on, what it costs over ten years, and how to choose without paying for a suite built for an airline ten times your size. It ends with a 30-point Airline Systems Buyer's Audit.
Two more are written and in production. All five are named on the back cover and on the series page inside the books, which is where I would rather commit than on a roadmap slide.
If there is a corner of this industry you think deserves the same treatment, I would like to hear it.
What I left out
I have a commercial interest too. I am Chief Product Officer at FinMont, a travel payments company, and I consult in this industry. No client or employer is described in either book, and nothing in them recommends a vendor, including mine. But the sentence higher up about everyone else having an interest applies to me as well, and I would rather say it than have you find it.
The benchmark scores are mine, not a study. The 20 to 35, the above 48, the 25 to 40, the above 65. They come from what I have seen inside a limited number of organisations. Nobody has run these diagnostics across a representative sample of the industry, so the ranges are a starting point for an argument rather than a measurement.
The diagnostics are judgement in the shape of a scorecard. Scoring something 0, 1 or 2 makes it look measured. What actually happened is that I decided which forty things matter, and someone else would have chosen differently.
These are self-published. No publisher's editor pushed back on a chapter and no external reviewer made me cut an argument I was fond of. Several people read drafts and several items changed because of them, but that is not the same as independent review.
And they are dated. Both books are written to what was true in 2026. The parts on NDC, agentic payments and AI agents as a channel will age fastest, and I would expect some of it to read badly within two years. The economics underneath moves much more slowly, which is why most of each book is about that instead.
Both books are available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover.
- Airline Distribution Explained
- Travel Payments Explained
- Airline Systems Explained, out 10 November, on pre-order