You’re a mid-tier airline. You have a clear idea of what you want to do next, be it a new route, a new offer, a new way to reach passengers. But when you raise it with your team, someone tells you the system won’t support it, that it will take a year, given that the ticket we raise is even processed.

I hear that story almost every time I talk to airline professionals.

The biggest carriers have hyper-personalised stacks and dedicated teams to build workarounds. Smaller airlines don’t have those resources. So they end up being slowed down by their own systems. Mid-tier airlines collectively carry over one billion passengers a year, but no vendor was built specifically for them.

An industry that digitised first, and got stuck

Aviation was one of the first industries to go digital. Global Distribution Systems were built in the 1960s. Passenger Service Systems followed in the decades after. At the time, they were the best enterprise software on the market.

The problem is that the architecture of those original systems is not fit for today’s world. The interfaces require weeks of training, and every change requires a ticket and an absurdly long wait. When you are not a large carrier with significant IT teams, the costly licence fees add up to the opportunity cost of features unavailable in your PSS.

Why nobody entered this market

You would expect this situation to have attracted competition, and that newcomers with fresh and agile technology would enter the market. But I see two reasons why this has not happened.

First, the barriers to entry are high. A PSS handles reservations, inventory, ticketing, check-in, and departure control. Getting it right, and ensuring interoperability across NDC standards, IATA requirements, interline agreements, and GDS connectivity, takes years and significant investment before a single airline goes live.

Second, airlines themselves are locked in. Aviation is a highly regulated industry with long commercial cycles. The regulation and cost of entry deter newcomers. The long sales cycles and operational risk of a migration deter airlines. Over time, most have also layered system upon system, patching gaps with custom solutions until the stack becomes deeply interconnected, poorly documented, and impossible to touch without risk.

The result is a dead-end. The biggest players do not prioritise mid-tier airlines because the economics do not compel them to. New entrants do not enter because the market obstacles are too high. And the airlines in the middle get systems that were never built for their needs.

I have had airline CEOs tell me that their tier-one provider does not even answer their emails, because small carriers are not the customer these vendors were built for, even though they need sophisticated software to manage their operations.

Why a window is opening now

Cloud infrastructure, modern API standards, and the shift to NDC and OOSD models have created openings that did not exist a decade ago. A small team can today build software with the reliability, security, and depth that would have required hundreds of engineers before.

The airlines themselves are more ready than ever. Airline executives grew up booking holidays on their phones and experiencing personalised communication and offer on all touchpoints, so they look at their operational technology and see the contrast clearly. They want to become real retailers, to offer new services, adjust prices dynamically, and respond to market conditions without waiting months for a development cycle.

At CitizenPlane, we work with airlines across the world. No matter the region, the problems we encounter are always variations of the same thing: a data layer nobody fully controls, a GDS-only distribution strategy, a revenue management team overriding their systems manually because they have no control over the automation. We see that everywhere and those examples are not isolated cases.

I believe a window of opportunity is opening in the market, and the airlines are ready to seize it.

By Hadrien Musitelli, CitizenPlane, CEO

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