Air France-KLM to temporarily reduce GDS surcharge

Air France and KLM’s planned GDS surcharge for business travel agencies will be levied from 1 January 2025, the airline groups confirmed, albeit at the reduced rate of €3 for the first six months of the year.

The TMC surcharge on EDIFACT-based GDS bookings, which has been repeatedly delayed, was expected to be €24 per segment but will be significantly reduced to €3 from 1 January 2025 to 30 June 2025 to “ease the transition” towards new distribution content (NDC) technology.

From 1 July however, the surcharge will be levied according to “the normal EDIFACT surcharge applicable to all at that time,” said Vincent Audusseau, director of global corporate sales at Air France-KLM. “Today it’s €24 but in six months it could be more.”

The surcharge will be applicable to all TMCs, globally, with preferred channel agreements with Air France-KLM. “These agreements will be replaced with NDC transition agreements and [agencies] will need to sign new agreements to benefit from [the interim discount],” Audusseau explained.

After receiving initial pushback to the rollout of its NDC strategy, Audusseau said the ecosystem is “now very close to being ready” for NDC and that corporate customers want to access the sister airlines’ NDC content “at full speed”.

“It’s a long journey but we’re seeing a lot of activity now in terms of activation, pilots and even full deployment of NDC in the corporate segment,” he said. “We don’t want to break this momentum, even though the ecosystem is not fully ready… that’s why we need this extra six months to be fair [to our partners]… because we don’t want to brutalise the ecosystem and the market.”

Audusseau said the NDC transition agreement was created “in the spirit of accompanying the market and moving forward into this new NDC world”.