A travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC brings together traditional GDS content and NDC airline-direct content in one search, one comparison view, and one booking flow.
New Distribution Capability is an XML-based data transmission standard developed by IATA. Its purpose is to give airlines a way to distribute rich, personalized offers, including branded fares, bundled ancillaries, and dynamic pricing, directly to travel sellers, rather than being limited to the flatter fare structures that traditional EDIFACT-based GDS distribution supports.
Before NDC, an airline's ability to differentiate its product through a GDS channel was limited. Two passengers searching the same route through the GDS would typically see the same fare classes and the same standardized content regardless of which travel seller they used. NDC changes this by letting the airline construct and control the offer itself, similar to how an airline's own website can show a curated bundle of seat, baggage, and meal options at a specific price point.
For travel agencies, this creates both an opportunity and a complication. The opportunity is access to richer content: branded fares, ancillary bundles, and offers that are not always available through traditional GDS channels. The complication is that NDC content arrives through a different technical pathway than GDS content, and every airline can implement NDC slightly differently. Combining the two into one coherent search result for an agent or a customer is a genuine integration challenge, not just an additional API call.
Amadeus addresses this complexity through what it calls the Amadeus Travel Platform, which is designed to bring together content from multiple sources, including traditional EDIFACT GDS content and NDC content from airline partners, into a single environment that travel sellers can search and book from.
According to Amadeus, every airline implements NDC a bit differently, and Amadeus manages this variability so that NDC content is delivered to travel sellers through one simplified shop, order, pay, and service flow, regardless of which airline's NDC implementation is behind it.
This matters significantly for anyone building a travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC. Rather than building separate integrations for each airline's own NDC API, which is the alternative approach some aggregators take, a platform built on the Amadeus Travel Platform can access NDC content from Amadeus's connected airline partners through one consistent interface alongside standard GDS fares.
A few concrete facts about how this works in practice are worth noting for anyone planning an integration:
This is a meaningfully different starting point than building a custom integration with each individual airline's own NDC endpoint, which is technically possible but requires separate certification, separate maintenance, and separate handling of each airline's particular implementation quirks.
Anyone planning a new Amadeus integration in 2026 should be aware of a specific change that affects how access is provisioned. Amadeus has confirmed that its self-service developer portal, the entry point many smaller agencies and independent developers have used to access Amadeus APIs on a pay-as-you-go basis, is being decommissioned in mid-2026, with enterprise-level APIs remaining available through the separate Amadeus Enterprise portal.
This is a relevant planning consideration for a travel aggregator portal with the Amadeus and NDC project. Agencies and technology teams starting a new build should confirm directly with Amadeus or an authorized Amadeus implementation partner which access tier and onboarding path applies to their business at the time they begin development, rather than assuming the legacy self-service signup flow still applies. The core APIs, including flight search, pricing, booking, and NDC content access, remain available; what changes is the account provisioning route.
A travel agency evaluating this kind of build sometimes asks whether NDC will eventually replace GDS content entirely, in which case building for both might seem like unnecessary complexity. In practice, the two content types serve different and complementary purposes, and a platform that only sources one will systematically miss the inventory and pricing that the other provides.
Traditional EDIFACT-based GDS content remains the backbone of global flight distribution. It covers the widest base of airlines, including carriers that have not yet adopted NDC or that distribute only a portion of their content through it. For an aggregator that needs comprehensive route and fare coverage across the full range of airlines a customer might want to book, GDS content is not optional.
For airlines that have invested in NDC, the content available through that channel is often richer and sometimes more competitively priced than what the same airline distributes through traditional GDS channels. Some carriers have applied direct connection surcharges to legacy GDS bookings as an incentive to push distribution toward NDC and direct channels, which means in some cases NDC content is not just richer but genuinely less expensive for the end customer. An aggregator that consistently ignores NDC risks shows a higher price than what is actually available for that route.
NDC allows airlines to present branded fare families and bundled ancillaries, such as seat selection, baggage, and priority boarding, packaged together at a specific price point, in a way that traditional GDS fare classes typically cannot replicate with the same granularity. A travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC that surfaces these bundles gives customers more relevant choices and gives the agency more opportunities for ancillary revenue.
If a platform shows only GDS content, customers searching for an airline that has shifted its best fares to NDC will see an incomplete or inflated price. If a platform shows only NDC content, it misses the airlines that have not adopted NDC and misses fares that remain GDS-exclusive. A combined approach is the only way to give customers a genuinely complete and price-accurate search result.
Building a platform that genuinely combines GDS and NDC content requires more than calling a single search endpoint. Here is how a production-ready architecture for this kind of travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC typically comes together.
At the foundation is the connection to the Amadeus Travel Platform, accessed through the Amadeus Travel API or the equivalent enterprise API suite depending on your access tier. This layer authenticates with Amadeus using OAuth 2.0, manages the session lifecycle, sends search requests, and receives a combined response that can include both traditional GDS fares and NDC offers from connected airline partners, depending on how the request is configured.
Because Amadeus already performs the work of normalising different airlines' NDC implementations into one consistent flow, this integration core is significantly simpler than building separate NDC connections to each airline directly. It still requires careful handling of the differences between how NDC offers and traditional fares are structured in the response data, since NDC offers carry additional attributes for branded fare descriptions and ancillary bundling that standard GDS fares do not.
Even with Amadeus handling much of the underlying complexity, the application layer of your aggregator still needs an offer normalisation step. This layer takes the raw response, which may include a mix of GDS fares and NDC offers with different data shapes, and converts everything into one consistent internal format that your search results page, pricing engine, and booking workflow can work with uniformly.
This is where decisions get made about how to present branded fare names, how to display included versus optional ancillaries, and how to ensure that a customer comparing a GDS fare against an NDC offer for the same route sees an apples-to-apples comparison rather than two inconsistent formats.
Once offers are normalised, your pricing engine applies markup rules, sorts results according to your business logic, and decides how to rank GDS and NDC offers against each other. A common approach is to rank by total price inclusive of any mandatory ancillaries, since an NDC bundle that includes baggage might be genuinely cheaper than a GDS base fare that excludes it once the customer's actual needs are factored in.
Some platforms also apply weighting logic that favours NDC content when the airline relationship or commercial terms make it advantageous, while ensuring GDS content remains visible for routes or airlines where NDC coverage is incomplete.
When a customer selects an offer and proceeds to book, the booking layer needs to handle the transaction correctly, whether the underlying content was sourced through GDS or NDC. Amadeus issues NDC bookings as a standard PNR through the Amadeus Interface Record, which is a meaningful technical advantage because it means your existing booking confirmation, ticketing, amendment, and cancellation workflows do not need entirely separate logic paths for NDC versus GDS bookings. Both flow through the same PNR-based servicing infrastructure.
NDC content frequently includes structured ancillary and branded fare data that a standard GDS fare display does not carry in the same way. Your frontend needs a display layer specifically designed to present these options clearly: showing what is included in a branded fare bundle, what optional ancillaries are available for selection, and how the total price changes as a customer adds or removes them. This is a meaningfully different UI requirement than a simple fare list and should be planned as its own component rather than an afterthought.
You can review the full catalog of Amadeus travel APIs and platform capabilities at Amadeus for Developers. The following table summarizes the core capabilities relevant to a travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC build, based on how Amadeus describes its own platform.
Amadeus Capability | What It Provides | Relevance to the Aggregator Build |
Amadeus Travel API | NDC-enabled web services access integrating with an agency's existing systems | Primary API layer for building a custom aggregator with combined content |
Amadeus Travel Platform | Unified backend bringing together EDIFACT GDS, NDC, and LCC content sources | The underlying infrastructure that performs content consolidation |
Altea NDC and NDC Connect | Programs through which airlines distribute NDC content via Amadeus | Determines which airlines' NDC content is accessible through the platform |
Selling Platform Connect | Graphical interface displaying NDC and non-NDC content in one All Fares view | Reference point for how Amadeus itself presents combined content to agents |
Flight Offers Search and Price | Core flight search and price confirmation across connected content sources | Used for both GDS and NDC-sourced offers within the same workflow |
Amadeus Interface Record | The mechanism by which NDC bookings are issued as a standard PNR | Allows existing servicing and back office tools to work with NDC bookings |
Here is how a search and booking flow works: a travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC, from a search through to a confirmed booking.
Step | What Happens | Content Source Involved |
Search Request | Customer enters origin, destination, dates, and passenger details | Not applicable, this is an input collection |
Amadeus Query | Platform queries the Amadeus Travel Platform through the integration core | Both GDS and connected NDC airline content |
Raw Response Handling | System receives a combined response with mixed content types | GDS fares and NDC offers in their native formats |
Offer Normalization | Each offer is converted into a consistent internal structure | Applied uniformly regardless of source |
Pricing and Ranking | Markup rules applied, results sorted by total price, and business logic | Both content types ranked together |
Results Display | Customer or agent sees a unified list with branded fare and ancillary details shown clearly | Both content types are presented in one interface |
Selection and Price Confirmation | Selected offer is reconfirmed for the current price and availability | Source-appropriate confirmation call through Amadeus |
Booking Creation | Booking is submitted, and a PNR is created | Standard PNR issued for both GDS and NDC bookings via the Interface Record |
Confirmation and Servicing | Itinerary delivered; booking is available for amendment through standard tools | Unified servicing regardless of the original content source |
The practical value of building on the Amadeus Travel Platform rather than assembling separate GDS and NDC integrations independently is most visible in the last two steps. Because NDC bookings are issued as a standard PNR, your post-booking servicing tools, your reporting, and your mid and back office processes do not need a parallel set of logic just to handle NDC content differently from GDS content.
Any agency whose current platform sources content from only GDS or only a subset of airline-direct connections is, by definition, not showing customers the full picture of what is available. As more airlines shift meaningful content to NDC, the gap between a GDS-only platform and what is actually bookable in the market continues to widen. Agencies that want their search results to reflect genuine market reality need both sources.
Online travel agencies and aggregator platforms live or die on whether their displayed prices are accurate and competitive. A platform missing NDC content will, on certain routes and airlines, consistently show a higher price than what a competitor offering combined content can show. This is a direct and measurable competitive disadvantage in price comparison, which is the primary basis on which most OTA customers choose where to book.
Corporate travel programs increasingly want employees to have access to bundled fares that include the ancillaries the company's policy already covers, such as a checked bag or seat selection, rather than purchasing these separately. NDC's branded fare structure is well-suited to this, and a corporate booking platform that incorporates NDC content alongside GDS fares can present these bundles directly within the employee's policy-compliant search results.
A technology company building an aggregation product to license or white-label to multiple agency clients benefits from building the GDS and NDC combination once, at the platform level, rather than leaving each client agency to handle the complexity independently. This is a genuine product differentiator when competing for agency clients who are evaluating multiple aggregation platform vendors.
A combined GDS and NDC aggregator does not need to be built as an isolated system. It works best as a content layer that feeds multiple booking channels within a broader travel technology platform.
The core aggregation capability described in this guide is the technical foundation behind the travel aggregator portal product from Flight Terminus, which is built to consolidate content from multiple sources, including Amadeus GDS and connected NDC airline partners, into a single search and booking experience.
Once the combined content layer exists, it can power multiple front-end channels. A B2C flight booking portal can present the combined GDS and NDC results directly to consumers, showing branded fares and ancillary bundles in a retail-friendly format. The same content layer can power a custom B2B flight booking solution for agents who need net fare visibility and markup control across both GDS and NDC-sourced offers.
Agencies that want to extend this combined content access to their own sub-agent or franchise networks can deploy it through a white label flight booking portal framework, giving each partner agency a branded interface over the same underlying aggregated content.
The technical connection to Amadeus itself, including authentication, session handling, and the offer normalization work described earlier in this guide, is managed through Flight Terminus's integration services, with a dedicated Amadeus GDS integration module handling the specifics of the Amadeus Travel Platform connection.
For platforms that want to extend coverage even further, beyond Amadeus's own NDC airline partner network, to include low-cost carrier content or additional consolidator fares, the AQC flight API integration solution adds a supplementary content layer that sits alongside the Amadeus GDS and NDC connection, giving the aggregator an even broader view of available inventory.
Beyond the architecture diagram, there are practical realities that consistently surface in projects that combine GDS and NDC content. These are worth planning for explicitly rather than discovering mid-build.
Even with Amadeus normalizing much of the variability between airlines' NDC implementations, agencies building on top of the platform still encounter differences in how much ancillary detail different airlines expose, how their branded fare families are named and structured, and how consistently certain features like seat maps are available across NDC offers versus traditional fares. Build your offer normalization and display layers with the expectation that airline-by-airline differences will still need handling at the application level, even with Amadeus doing the underlying consolidation work.
While NDC bookings being issued as a standard PNR through the Amadeus Interface Record is a genuine simplification, amendment, cancellation, and refund workflows for NDC-sourced bookings can still carry airline-specific rules that differ from how the same actions work for a traditional GDS fare. Test your post-booking servicing flows specifically against NDC bookings from multiple airlines, not just against GDS bookings, before considering the platform production-ready.
Getting access to Amadeus APIs, particularly at the level required for a production aggregator combining GDS and NDC content, involves account provisioning, credentialing, and in many cases, a certification process to confirm the booking flows work correctly before going live with real transactions. Build this lead time into your project plan from the start, particularly given the 2026 changes to how Amadeus provisions self-service versus enterprise API access described earlier in this guide.
A naive price comparison that simply sorts by the lowest displayed fare can mislead customers when comparing a bare GDS base fare against an NDC bundle that already includes baggage and seat selection. The most trustworthy aggregator experience normalizes the comparison by showing the total price for an equivalent set of inclusions, or at minimum, makes clearly visible what is and is not included in each offer before the customer commits to a selection.
A travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and the NDC project has more moving parts than a standard GDS-only search and booking build. Here is a realistic phase breakdown.
Phase | What Happens | Typical Duration |
Discovery and Account Setup | Scope requirements, confirm Amadeus access tier and provisioning route, plan certification needs | 2 to 3 weeks |
Amadeus Integration Core | Build authentication, session management, and core search and price API connections | 4 to 6 weeks |
Offer Normalization Layer | Build the logic that converts GDS and NDC responses into one consistent internal format | 4 to 6 weeks |
Pricing and Ranking Engine | Implement markup rules, total-price comparison logic, and result ranking across content types | 3 to 4 weeks |
Branded Fare and Ancillary Display | Build the frontend components for showing bundled fares and optional ancillaries clearly | 3 to 5 weeks |
Booking and Servicing Layer | Build and test booking creation, amendment, and cancellation flows for both content types | 4 to 6 weeks |
Certification and Testing | Work through Amadeus certification requirements and end-to-end testing across multiple airlines | 3 to 6 weeks |
Soft Launch and Monitoring | Limited live release with close monitoring of pricing accuracy and booking success rates | 2 to 3 weeks |
A complete build typically takes four to seven months from project start to a stable production launch, depending on the scope of front-end channels the aggregated content needs to power and the depth of servicing functionality required.
The distribution landscape for air content has genuinely changed, and a booking platform that only sources GDS content is showing customers an incomplete and sometimes more expensive view of what is actually available. A travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC closes that gap by bringing traditional GDS fares and airline-direct NDC content together in one search, one price comparison, and one booking flow, using infrastructure that Amadeus has already built specifically to manage the complexity of multiple airlines' differing NDC implementations.
The technical work is real: offer normalization, pricing logic that accounts for what is actually included in each fare, and servicing flows that work correctly for both content types all require careful engineering. But the foundation, the Amadeus Travel Platform itself, removes a significant amount of the integration burden that would otherwise come from connecting to each airline's NDC implementation independently.
For agencies and travel technology teams that want their search results to genuinely reflect what is bookable in the market today, rather than a partial view limited to traditional GDS content, building this combination is no longer optional. It is the baseline that customers are increasingly comparing every platform against.
Frequently Asked Questions for building with Amadeus
GDS content refers to airline fares and inventory distributed through traditional EDIFACT-based messaging, which is the standard that Global Distribution Systems like Amadeus have used for decades. NDC, or New Distribution Capability, is a newer XML-based standard developed by IATA that allows airlines to distribute richer, more personalized offers directly, including branded fare bundles and ancillaries packaged together at a specific price point. The practical difference for a travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC is that GDS content tends to be more standardized and broadly available across nearly all airlines, while NDC content offers more product differentiation but is only available from the specific airlines that have built NDC connections, which is a growing but still partial subset of the market.
Amadeus has built the Amadeus Travel Platform specifically to bring together EDIFACT GDS content and NDC content from connected airline partners into one environment, accessible through products like the Amadeus Travel API and Amadeus Selling Platform Connect. This means you do not need to build a separate, independent integration with each individual airline's own NDC endpoint if you are sourcing that content through Amadeus. You still need an offer normalization layer in your own application to handle the structural differences between how GDS fares and NDC offers are represented, but the underlying connectivity and much of the airline-by-airline variability is managed by Amadeus rather than by your own integration team.
In most cases, yes. Amadeus issues NDC bookings as a standard PNR through the Amadeus Interface Record, which means the same queues, mid and back office systems, reporting tools, and servicing workflows that your agency already uses for GDS bookings generally continue to apply to NDC bookings as well. This is a significant practical advantage, since it means you are not maintaining two completely separate operational systems for the two content types. That said, some airline-specific NDC rules around amendments, cancellations, and refunds can still differ from how the same actions work on a traditional GDS fare, so it is worth testing your servicing workflows specifically against NDC bookings before considering building production-ready.
Amadeus has stated that a substantial and growing number of airlines, including dozens of major carriers, are connected through its Altea NDC and NDC Connect programs, which are the mechanisms airlines use to distribute their NDC content through the Amadeus Travel Platform to its network of travel sellers. The exact number and which specific airlines are connected changes over time as more carriers adopt NDC and expand their distribution agreements, so any agency planning a travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC build should confirm the current list of connected airline partners directly with Amadeus or an authorized implementation partner at the time of project planning, since this list is one of the more dynamic aspects of the NDC landscape.
Amadeus has confirmed that its self-service developer portal, which has historically been the entry point for smaller agencies and independent developers to access Amadeus APIs on a pay-as-you-go basis, is being decommissioned in mid-2026. Enterprise-level API access remains available through the separate Amadeus Enterprise portal. This means agencies and developers starting a new integration project should confirm directly with Amadeus which access tier and onboarding path currently applies to their business, rather than assuming the legacy self-service signup process is still the right starting point. The underlying APIs, including flight search, pricing, booking, and NDC content access, remain available; what has changed is the provisioning route through which new accounts are set up.
It can do both, and the price impact is often the more significant factor. Some airlines have applied direct connection surcharges to bookings made through traditional GDS channels as part of a broader push to shift distribution toward NDC and direct connections, which means in certain cases the NDC-sourced offer for a given route is genuinely less expensive than the equivalent GDS fare, not just differently packaged. A platform that only sources GDS content will, on those routes, consistently display a higher price than what is actually available in the market. Combining both content types through a travel aggregator portal with Amadeus and NDC is therefore not just about offering richer branded fare options; it is also about making sure the prices shown to customers are genuinely the most competitive ones available across all distribution channels.