“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”

So wrote the great business thinker Peter Ferdinand Drucker, author of many seminal texts on business and management.

At Travel Commerce Solutions, we started the year with these words as our guide and it has been a very intense and exhilarating 12 months!

Our initial step was to prove to ourselves that ‘something new’ could actually work and replace ‘something old’.

It has been a year of change in the aviation industry, with IATA publishing the new NDC standards (the latest being 16.2 in the autumn). There is a growing realisation that it is the future of distribution within the travel industry. Larger legacy airlines are beginning to adopt the principles, and smaller, more agile airlines have an opportunity to take advantage of the benefits NDC offers.

Although IATA have done a lot of ground work and continue to do so within their Simplifying the Business (StB) program, we wanted to challenge ourselves to go a step further.

So, we went back to the drawing board with all our knowledge and experience of how things are done now, and our vision of how things could be.

After a lot of hard work and deep thinking, we are proud to announce that ‘something new’ works and we can’t wait to tell you more next year.

It's been vital for us to keep in touch with the industry whilst building our innovative, new solution, so we have been working with industry experts from all over the world. They are providing invaluable support to help us realise our goals.

In October, Peter and I travelled to the AviaDev 2016 conference in Kigali, Rwanda, right in the heart of Africa. We took the opportunity to introduce the African travel industry to our passion for the power of merchandising. Throughout the year, we have also been busy giving IATA Training for Airlines – ‘Understanding and Adopting NDC’ and are engaged with airline clients in defining solutions for Airline Digital Retailing.

We also launched our company website and a profile on LinkedIn, and have moved into our first offices in Switzerland’s Innovation Hub – Technopark Zurich.

We would like to thank all the people within our industry and our partners who’ve encouraged us and supported us to reach where we are today.

Looking forward to our continued innovation in 2017!