Podcast: Air Canada on FlightPass, NDC, and the agentic future

Spotnana and Air Canada launched a partnership in April that gives Spotnana customers a direct connection to Air Canada’s NDC content and brings FlightPass, the airline’s subscription-style flight product, into Spotnana’s travel platform, allowing travelers to view and redeem FlightPass credits without agent assistance. 

For the 23rd episode of The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast, Senior Director of Content and Distribution at Spotnana Seth Anagnostis spoke with Keith Wallis, Managing Director of Customer Digital and Distribution at Air Canada, about why it took its NDC technology in-house, what its partnership with Spotnana means for corporate travel, and where airline distribution is heading as AI agents start booking trips on travelers’ behalf.

An entrepreneurial mindset

Wallis describes Air Canada as the Goldilocks airline, big enough to put real resources behind ambitious ideas but small enough to move quickly without inertia weighing it down. That combination, he argues, allows the carrier to operate with an entrepreneurial mindset that few of its peers can match.

Size is only part of it, as Air Canada’s leadership “has always encouraged us to think with an entrepreneurial mindset and given us all permission to move quickly, break things, but recover quickly and try new things,” Wallis said. 

When Air Canada decides to try something, the path from idea to launch is short.

Building NDC technology

Not every product decision has been easy, however. The most nerve-wracking of recent years, Wallis said, was the choice to build Air Canada’s NDC technology from the ground up.

“There were a few of us who felt very strongly that building this from the ground up ourselves and controlling that roadmap was strategically important,” Wallis said. The team had to convince executives, stand up new engineering capability Air Canada, and ship a functional PSS in six to eight months.

Few airlines run their own NDC technology. Wallis sees the decision as one of the airline’s clearest differentiators. Owning the roadmap means Air Canada can move at its own pace and accelerate development when an opportunity is present.

An industry leader

Building its own technology has not pulled Air Canada away from the rest of the industry. Wallis participates in industry conversations often and the airline donates time from senior people to working groups that rarely produce headlines.

Air Canada is deeply connected with United and Lufthansa Group, for example, through Star Alliance, and a wider network of other carriers. Customers travel across that network every day. Serving them well requires shared standards, shared data, and shared operational practices.

“You don’t take your Air Canada hat off and check it at the door, but you put an industry hat on top of it,” Wallis said of his approach to conversations with the wider airline industry. Disagreements happen and compromise is the norm.

Flightpass flexibility

This approach shaped Air Canada’s partnership with Spotnana, which includes a direct connection into Air Canada’s NDC APIs and an integration that brings FlightPass, the airline’s subscription-style flight product, into Spotnana’s travel platform.

FlightPass has grown into a corporate travel staple in Canada. Customers buy a set number of flights, or an unlimited monthly subscription, that can be used across a defined geographic zone. Eastern Canada, trans-Canada, and Eastern Seaboard zones cover the routes Canadian travelers use most. The price locks in at the moment of purchase, which has become more valuable as airfares grow more volatile.

“Corporate travel programs are all about understanding, knowing, tracking, reporting on, managing spend,” Wallis said. FlightPass gives buyers a clean way to do that across high-frequency routes.

When Wallis brought the idea to Spotnana, he expected pushback given how structurally different FlightPass is from a traditional fare. The response was the opposite. “You jumped right in with both feet, saying ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’ll figure it out,’” he said. 

What makes the partnership work, in Wallis’s framing, is Spotnana’s architecture and willingness to adapt to what Air Canada actually needed rather than ask the airline to compromise.

Offer, order, settle, deliver, and AI

Asked where airline retailing is heading, Wallis is direct about which parts of the offer, order, settle, and deliver (OOSD) journey deserve the most attention.

Real-time, dynamic, traveler-specific offers are what most of the industry talks about. Wallis points out, however, that almost every airline already on the journey has begun with order, not offer. Static fare families are imperfect for travelers, and the harder problem is delivering whatever offer is sold.

“As much as you can create interesting offers that customers really engage with, the fundamentals of getting it right when they travel matter more,” he said. Order and delivery technology determine whether the rest works.

AI is now top of mind for Air Canada. Wallis’ adult children planned a vacation last year using TikTok and ChatGPT and trusted the result implicitly. Air Canada is already seeing travelers start their search in AI assistants and end up on the airline’s site through a referral. It’s an open question whether this phenomenon evolves into agentic booking, with AI personal assistants holding wallets, loyalty cards, and preferences when shopping on their user’s behalf.

“How do we build technology that allows those agents to talk to us on the customer’s behalf? And who are our marketers marketing to now? Do they market to the traveler or do they market to an agent?” Wallis asked.

Travel as a human emotion

Air Canada’s new Glowing Hearted cabin design, named after a line in the Canadian national anthem, doubles as the brand’s broader hospitality philosophy. 

Wallis sees it as the airline’s version of travel as a human emotion. Whatever shape retailing takes over the next few years, the goal of Air Canada stays the same: keep the connection to the traveler and let the trip itself fade into the background of their life.

“What we do every day directly impacts what people experience when they’re traveling with us.”