Why GDS's Are Facing a BlackBerry Moment
The infrastructure isn’t disappearing. It’s just being rewired.
For decades, Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) have powered the backbone of travel.
They built the pipes, the protocols, the inventory logic.
They succeeded in standardising chaos.
But the world changed.
And those very strengths, centralisation, control, and stability are now liabilities.
We’re entering a new phase of travel infrastructure: modular, real-time, preference-aware.
And GDSs?
They're staring down a BlackBerry moment not because travel is disappearing, but because it’s being rewired from the outside in.
The Foundations Are Changing: From PNRs to Offers and Orders
IATA’s One Order initiative and the industry-wide move toward Offer and Order management is not a subtle shift.
It’s a complete rewiring of the way travel is priced, personalised, and fulfilled.
Fare filing is giving way to attribute-based pricing
Inventory is becoming more modular and context-aware
Central Reservation Systems (CRSs) are evolving into real-time engines with more granular inventory and assets.
NDC adoption is increasing: Over 60 airlines now offer NDC content, and IATA forecasts 80% of indirect sales via NDC by 2030
The GDS, which was optimised for fare buckets, filed content, and rigid shopping flows, wasn’t built for this.
It’s retrofitting fast, but so did BlackBerry.
The Pipes Are Rusting. Aggregation Is Up for Grabs.
Travel is shifting from a centralised inventory distribution model to a federated offer model.
Today:
Airlines push differentiated content through NDC
Hotels increasingly use CRS plus direct channels with rich merchandising
Rail, mobility, and ancillaries are often disconnected from GDSs
Corporate content preferences (like negotiated fares) are increasingly custom
And yet: no one is aggregating this in a unified, programmable layer.
Spotnana is making moves. So are Navan, TravelPerk, Duffel, Kyte.
But even they are partial. There is no single orchestration layer that truly unifies all offers, orders, pricing logic, and fulfilment across sources.
That’s a massive gap and one that could be filled not by a traditional aggregator but by AI native agents, sourcing and assembling content dynamically, API by API, rule by rule.
Pricing Logic Is Leaving the Building
Historically, GDSs encoded:
Pricing rules
Commission structures
Revenue management constraints
Distribution contracts
Today, much of that is moving:
Revenue management sits in the airline’s offer engine
Pricing is dynamic, attribute-based, and context-sensitive
Corporate policies and traveller preferences are external to GDS’s
AI-powered agents (not human travel agents) are learning to shop based on goals, not fixed flows
This matters because the brain of the system is migrating upstream.
When decisions about what to show, how to price, and who to personalise for leave the GDS…
What’s left?
Fulfilment?
That’s not a moat.
AI Agents Could Be the New Meta GDS
If the GDS was the old interface for booking agents and systems to shop and book, the new interface could be:
AI copilots shopping based on profile context
Programmable agents navigating offer APIs in real time
Middleware that blends booking logic, rules, inventory, and policies on demand
Think: Metasearch meets travel policy engine meets profile infrastructure.
AI agents won’t just surface results.
They’ll negotiate, filter, and compose trips based on live context, approvals, and traveller needs without needing GDS’s to hold every rule.
Whoever builds that orchestration layer whether it's Spotnana, Camino Network, a new entrant, or a modular stack like Travlr ID plus partner agents, this could become the new operating system for travel infrastructure.
And that Operating System won’t need to look like a GDS at all.
Suppliers Are Now Driving the Experience
Perhaps most importantly:
Suppliers no longer want to be passive content contributors.
They want to control the brand experience.
Own the margin.
Get visibility into traveller context.
And use their own engines for dynamic pricing, upsell, and loyalty bundling (the OTA vs Direct argument is playing out).
This is why they’re pulling away from flat GDS content and leaning into NDC, direct connects, and custom corporate partnerships.
Buyers are following.
So are TMCs.
So are startups.
Even legacy players are integrating NDC pipelines and offer engines into their own workflows because the status quo is cracking.
The Real BlackBerry Moment
BlackBerry didn’t die because people stopped caring about email.
It died because:
It underestimated the shift in interface
It ignored the rise of openness
It failed to reinvent the experience around the user
The GDS industry risks the same path.
Because while the need for orchestration, fulfilment, and trust remains,
the way we deliver that is being reimagined by buyers, suppliers, and builders alike.
If GDSs want to stay relevant, they’ll need to stop retrofitting and start rearchitecting.
Not just with new APIs but with a new philosophy:
Profiles over records
Consent over contracts
Orchestration over ownership
Programmability over prefiling
Let me be clear for my distribution friends. I’m not saying GDSs are going out of business.
These companies power far more than just content distribution.
They sit deep within airline infrastructure. They manage mission critical workflows.
They’re connected to the total trip in ways most people never see.
But the moat is shifting.
And where moats shift, new players move in.
It won’t be about replacing GDSs entirely. It will be about rebalancing the stack.
About deciding who owns the interface. Who orchestrates the offer. Who controls the context.
That’s the opportunity.
And it’s already in motion.
-Gee Mann - Travel Tech Optimist.