Guest Post: How AI can accelerate airlines’ journey to modern airline retailing

Tye Radcliffe, chief customer success officer at Accelya, rationalises the benefits for you

Most travellers don’t think about the systems behind the booking. What they notice are the small misses – offers for products they’re entitled to receive for free as frequent flyers or having to chase an airline during a disruption. While the industry has worked to fix these gaps for years, the real breakthrough lies in modern retailing: making every interaction simpler, more personalised and relevant, and easier to deliver at scale.

That’s the promise of modern airline retailing – turning richer content and cleaner fulfilment into experiences customers return for, and revenue airlines can measure. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key enabler. By turning data into intelligence, AI helps airlines move faster, optimise pricing, anticipate disruptions, and automate service to accelerate the transition to modern retailing.

Yet, we've found while around two-thirds of airlines have advanced on New Distribution Capabilities (NDC) (66%), fewer than one in three (27%) have made substantive moves toward Offer and Order transformation. This lack of progress comes despite 72% of airlines considering the transition strategically important. Too often, transformation is approached through the lens of compliance – meeting deadlines, checking boxes, minimizing risk – rather than as a retailing strategy. The result is stalled momentum.

In this article, I’ll explore why transformation to modern retailing is lagging, how AI can unlock its value today, and what practical steps airlines can take to move forward with confidence.

From fragmented records to ONE Order 

The shift to Offers and Orders marks the airline industry’s move to true modern retailing. It enables airlines to present customers with richer, more relevant choices through a holistic Offer, and to capture the entire purchase in a single Order, replacing today's fragmented records and documents.

At its simplest, the Offers and Orders paradigm means two things:

• Offers represent the full range of products and services an airline can present to a customer – not just fares, but ancillaries such as seat types, bags, Wi-Fi and bundles. 
• Orders capture the customer’s selections and payments in one place, replacing today’s patchwork of Passenger Name Records (PNRs), e-tickets and Electronic Miscellaneous Documents (EMDs). 

This unification simplifies servicing, strengthens data integrity, and lays the foundation for modern retailing. While transformation can seem daunting – touching almost every process and legacy system – treating it as a distant “future state” is a missed opportunity. Airlines don’t need to overhaul everything at once; they can capture value one step at a time. 

Here, AI becomes a catalyst for transformation, extracting insight and value from order data before any full cutover, building confidence and momentum on the journey to modern retailing. 

Turning structured data into better decisions

The Offer Order Settle Deliver (OOSD) journey provides clean, structured data about what a customer has chosen, paid for, and used. AI turns that data into smarter decisions. It learns from demand and competitive signals to refine pricing, automates merchandising rules so teams can launch products faster, and gives finance and operations real-time order visibility to cut hand-offs and delays.

The impact is measurable. Airlines using dynamic pricing have seen up to a 6% revenue uplift, we've found, while AI-driven merchandising can cut onboarding time for new bundles by as much as 85%. AI also transforms order queries into intelligence, helping teams across commercial, operations, and service achieve double-digit improvements in resolution time. For passengers, that translates into more relevant offers, faster responses when plans change, and a smoother journey end to end. For airlines, it means higher conversion, faster time to market, and lower servicing costs. 

Imagine a traveller connecting through a hub when their inbound flight runs late. With order context and AI-driven insights, the airline could identify this risk early and push targeted offers, such as fast-track access, to protect their connection. Similarly, when a large travel group is affected by a weather waiver, smart automation – enhanced and scaled with AI capabilities – could ensure that paid extras remain visible to servicing teams, with transaction revenue instantly recognized and seamlessly settled. The result: faster insights, quicker response times, and cleaner fulfilment. 

Making transformations manageable

The key to modern airline retailing is remembering that while transformation is complex, it doesn’t require a full system overhaul. Airlines can move step by step, with each change proving its value. High-impact, low-friction use cases – such as dynamic offer optimization on priority markets, order insight for disruption-prone corridors, or merchandizing automation for top ancillaries – all stand on their own commercial merits.

Modular, open components that work with today’s stack and tomorrow’s platforms let them manage change at their own pace. Cross-functional teams – revenue, digital, operations, finance, and servicing – should share KPIs and a test-and-learn rhythm. Data quality matters more than volume as the right signals improve decisions. And airlines should retain control of their data and models to avoid lock-in and scale what works.

Modern retailing isn’t optional 

In the modern retailing transformation journey, the early adopters of AI are already converting AI-ready data into sharper pricing, faster product cycles, and better day-of-travel experiences.

The move to OOSD isn’t optional; it’s the next retailing frontier. With AI as the accelerator, airlines can shift transformation from compliance to commercial strategy and build momentum one validated use case at a time. The leaders are the ones who start.