· Airline Distribution · GenX eSolutions
There are three broad ways to source air content, and most agencies of any scale end up using all three. Understanding what each is good at makes the mix deliberate rather than accidental.
GDS
The traditional route, through Amadeus, Sabre or Travelport. Broad carrier coverage, mature servicing tooling, and well-understood fare rules. The trade-offs are segment fees, patchy low-cost carrier coverage, and a booking flow that assumes GDS semantics throughout — which becomes an obstacle when you add non-GDS content later.
Direct LCC connections
Low-cost carriers largely distribute outside the GDS. Direct connections give you their real inventory and ancillaries at the best commercial terms, but each one is a separate integration with its own quirks, its own auth model and its own support relationship. Five direct LCC connections is five things to maintain.
Aggregators and consolidators
One integration, many carriers. Genuinely the fastest way to get broad coverage live, and the right choice for the long tail of carriers. You pay for it in margin and you inherit the aggregator's availability accuracy, which varies.
How the mix usually settles
A common and sensible pattern: GDS for full-service carriers and complex itineraries, direct connections for the two or three LCCs that dominate your key routes, and an aggregator for everything else. The important part is that your platform treats all three as content sources behind one interface — otherwise the mix becomes three parallel booking flows, and the servicing complexity compounds.
The question to ask before deciding
Look at your booking distribution by carrier over the last twelve months. If eighty percent of your air bookings are on six carriers, direct connections to those six plus an aggregator for the rest will almost always beat paying segment fees across the board. If your volume is genuinely spread, the GDS-plus-aggregator model is simpler and probably cheaper overall.