IATA Airline Retailing Maturity Index – What it means for you

At DDRS 2021, IATA launched the Airline Retailing Maturity (ARM) index, which involves airlines, sellers, and system providers and aims to foster better retailing capabilities across the industry. The initiative helps airlines take stock of where they are on their retailing journey. As IATA validates claims regarding retailing capabilities, the index also boosts transparency. This means that companies can assess their abilities in relation to others, and players can more easily find relevant retailing partners.

The ARM index has three validation ‘pillars’:

• Capabilities verification– Open to airlines, sellers, and system providers, it is a registry of proven technical abilities for shop, order, pay, settle, account, and set up. IATA describes these abilities in business terms, making it easier for companies to navigate the information. The certification is a replacement, remodeling, and extension of previous designations such as NDC and ONE Order. It broadens the scope of these certifications to encompass airline retailing using offers and orders. As such, it incorporates Settlement with Orders (SwO), dynamic offer creation, and the future of interline. IATA regularly updates the registry as capabilities are validated.
• Partnership deployment– Open to airlines and sellers, this pillar measures scalability across the retailing value chain. It includes a review of network reach, customer access to offers and orders, and volumes.
• Value capture– Open only to airlines, this pillar assesses an airline’s retailing capabilities and quantifies gaps. It helps airlines get a view on retailing readiness across the airline business, understand the value of their current position, and establish possible next steps.

As an IATA launch partner, we’re the first provider to gain the latest IATA Airline Retailing Maturity (ARM) index on schema version 20.2. This designation recognizes that Accelya’s Order Accounting solution now accepts orders as an input for settlement, also known as Settlement with Orders (SwO).

We caught up with Yanik Hoyles at DDRS in Madrid ahead of the IATA launch. Hear what he had to say about this next wave of transformation.

For more information about Accelya’s ARM certification click here.