Modular Airline Retailing is Alive and Delivering Strategic Advantages
In October 2025, eight consortia presented live, end-to-end Offers & Orders demonstrations at the IATA Modularity Demo Day in Geneva. The brief was simple but ambitious: show that airlines can run a complete commercial journey using modular, best-of-breed components from multiple independent vendors, without relying on a single monolithic PSS.
One of those demonstrations -- delivered by OpenJaw Technologies , PROS Travel , Lufthansa Systems , Piano , Airnguru , and iPort -- was selected by the attending airline representatives as the clearest and most airline-ready example of the day. No speeches, no champagne, just the quiet satisfaction of seeing a complex flow work exactly as intended, in real time, with six different companies’ systems talking to each other as if they had been built together.
That outcome is worth pausing on, not because it was dramatic, but because it was practical.
The Solution: Six Pieces, One Seamless Journey
The demo followed a single traveller from search to departure, using only modular components aligned to IATA’s five core domains.
- PROS created dynamic, optimized offers in real time.
- OpenJaw acted as the central Offer and Order engine, orchestrating the shopping and booking experience across B2B and B2C channels while maintaining a single source-of-truth order.
- Piano, a company from outside travel, layered in real-time behavioural and first-party data to drive hyper-relevant personalization (think showing a carbon-offset bundle only to the segment that consistently chooses it).
- Airnguru injected intelligent, personalised ancillary recommendations that felt additive rather than pushy.
- Lufthansa Systems (SIRAX ONE Order) handled accounting, settlement, and revenue recognition behind the curtain.
- iPort closed the loop with delivery -- check-in, bag tags, boarding, disruption messaging -- all driven directly from the modular order.
The result was a live booking that moved smoothly from dynamic offer creation to fulfilment without a single legacy PSS in the chain. For the airlines watching, the takeaway was straightforward: this is no longer a slideware vision. It can work today.
Why This Architecture Matters to Commercial Leaders
For Chief Commercial Officers, the strategic implications of a proven modular stack are more important than the technology itself.
- Innovation without borders Piano’s inclusion is the clearest proof point. A company that originated outside the airline industry brought battle-tested personalization logic from media and subscription businesses and simply plugged it in. Modularity lowers the barrier for non-travel specialists to contribute, which means the pace of new ideas is no longer constrained by the traditional vendor ecosystem.
- Controlled, low-risk migration Airlines do not have to commit to a five-year PSS replacement program. They can start with one domain – dynamic pricing, or order management, or settlement – and add the rest over time. Each new module can go live while the rest of the operation continues unchanged. Risk is contained, capital is spread, and revenue uplift begins earlier.
- Real negotiating leverage When components are interchangeable, no single supplier owns the entire stack. That changes conversations with legacy incumbents overnight. More importantly, as airlines begin to expose clean APIs for Multi-agent Collaboration Protocol (MCP) and future LLM-driven channels, they can do so on their own terms – not filtered through a GDS that may have competing interests in the AI layer.
These are not theoretical advantages. They are the direct consequences of an architecture that has now been demonstrated, end-to-end, in front of airline decision-makers.
Looking Ahead
The IATA Demo Day was never about crowning a winner; it was about removing doubt. One doubt has now been removed: a fully modular, multivendor Offers & Orders platform can run a live commercial journey today, with contributions from inside and outside the industry.
For airline commercial teams, the question is no longer “Will modularity work?” but “How fast do we want the benefits to start accruing?”
We believe the answer is sooner rather than later -- and we’re ready to prove it again, one airline at a time.