When I served as the European Distribution Manager for British Airways in the early 2000s, the world of airline data operated on a foundation of structural rigidity and high certainty. Today, leading strategy at Aggregate Intelligence in 2026, the modern data intelligence provider for the airlines, I look back at that time and realize we were living in a “deterministic era”.
NB: This is an article from Aggregate Intelligence, one of our Expert Partners
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Over the last two decades, the industry has undergone a profound philosophical shift, moving from a centralized monolith to a fragmented mosaic.
My personal evolution mirrors this industry trajectory. To understand the complexity of modern data intelligence, we have to understand the simpler world we left behind.
The Era of “Granted” Data (2008)
When I departed British Airways in 2008, the distribution landscape was dominated by an oligopoly of Global Distribution Systems (GDS). These providers acted as the undisputed clearinghouses for global airline inventory.
In that environment, my interaction with data was passive. I treated GDS data as “granted”—an immutable byproduct of the transaction. We filed fares and operated within fixed price ladders using pre-defined Booking Designators. The “truth” of a price was singular, filed, and retrievable from a single pipe. We never questioned the veracity of a fare displayed on a green screen because, for all intents and purposes, the GDS was the market.
The Great Fragmentation
The dissolution of this singular truth didn’t happen overnight. It began with the “disaggregation” fostered by Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) in Europe, which proved that high-volume sales could occur entirely outside the GDS ecosystem. This created the first major blind spot in traditional data feeds.
This was accelerated by the introduction of IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) in 2012. NDC signaled a shift from static EDIFACT messaging to dynamic XML standards, allowing airlines to decouple offer creation from legacy infrastructure and act as true retailers.
2026: The Stochastic Turn
Standing here in 2026, the static certainty of my days at BA has been replaced by dynamic complexity. My own cognitive evolution has had to shift from rule-based logic to understanding reinforcement learning and AI.
