The industry puts the value of Modern Airline Retailing at USD 45 billion in unlockable annual value by 2030. That number gets quoted constantly. What gets quoted far less is how to capitalise on this value generation.
Budgets get approved, vendors get selected, and then the hard questions surface: where do we start? Which systems do we modernise first? How do we keep the operation running while we rebuild it?
This guide answers those questions directly. It draws on Branchspace's work with some of the world's most pioneering carriers, and it maps directly to the frameworks inside the MAR Readiness Playbook, the most complete practical guide to MAR transformation available today.
How should airlines assess their readiness for Modern Airline Retailing?
Readiness is not a binary state. An airline is not ready or not ready for MAR. It sits somewhere on a spectrum across multiple dimensions simultaneously, and the specific pattern of strengths and gaps is what determines where to start and how fast to move.
The right starting point is a structured assessment across five dimensions:
- strategic positioning
- customer experience and channel evolution
- organisational readiness
- process transformation
- and technology enablement.
Each dimension needs to be evaluated independently, because an airline that is strategically aligned and commercially motivated can still be held back by process fragmentation or a technology estate that cannot support the transition at the pace the business expects.
The assessment also needs to be honest. The most common failure mode we see is not strategic misalignment, it is an overly optimistic view of how quickly legacy constraints can be resolved, and an underestimate of the organisational change required alongside the technical work.
The MAR Readiness Playbook includes an interactive five dimension readiness assessment that any airline commercial or technology leader can complete in under ten minutes. It generates an archetype result, Foundational, Developing, or Leading, and points toward the right sequencing pathway from that starting point.
The five pillars of airline retailing transformation
MAR transformation is not a technology replacement. It is a business transformation that touches every part of how an airline creates, prices, sells, and delivers travel. Understanding the full scope is essential before committing to a programme.
The five dimensions that determine readiness are:
1. Strategic Positioning. Does the airline have a clear, shared view of what MAR means for its business model, not just at board level, but across commercial, IT, and operations? Misalignment here is the leading cause of programme stall.
2. Customer Experience and Channel Evolution. Where is the airline selling today, through which channels, and how far does the current experience fall short of what personalised retailing requires? Channel complexity drives implementation complexity.
3. Organisational Readiness. MAR requires commercial and technology teams to work in ways they have not worked before. Governance structures, ways of working, and capability gaps all need to be assessed before a programme starts.
4. Process Transformation. Fulfilling personalised offers and managing orders in real time requires process changes that reach well beyond IT. Revenue management, customer service, disruption handling, and accounting are all affected.
5. Technology Enablement. This is the dimension most programmes start with. It should not be. The technology picture matters enormously, but its implications only become clear once the other four dimensions have been assessed. For a detailed view of the technology landscape, the Branchspace Transform practice works with carriers at every stage of the journey.
Offer modernisation vs Order modernisation: what is the difference?
These two terms are frequently conflated. They describe distinct but related workstreams, and confusing them leads to poorly sequenced programmes.
Offer modernisation is about how an airline creates and prices what it sells. It covers dynamic pricing, personalised bundling, attribute-based selling, and the shift away from fare-class-based revenue management. The goal is to present the right offer to the right customer at the right time, rather than publishing a static fare structure and hoping for the best.
Order modernisation is about how the airline manages what it has sold. It covers the transition from PNR-based booking records to ONE Order, where everything a customer has purchased sits in a single, structured order that can be managed, modified, and fulfilled in real time. This is the plumbing behind genuinely seamless service recovery, flexible rebooking, and post-purchase personalisation.
The two workstreams are related because a modern order cannot fulfil offers that the legacy fulfilment system was not designed to handle. But they do not have to move at the same pace, and many airlines start with offer modernisation because it delivers commercial value faster and with less systemic risk.
Which one your airline should prioritise first depends on where the biggest commercial opportunity sits, and what the current technology estate can support.
How long does airline OOM transformation take?
The honest answer is longer than most airlines expect when they start.
The full transition to Offer and Order Management, from initial programme launch to full legacy sunset, typically unfolds over 7 to 10 years. That is not a reason to delay. It is a reason to start with a clear view of what the first three years need to achieve, and to build a programme structure that can sustain momentum over a long horizon.
The length of the transition is driven by several factors. Legacy PSS systems are deeply embedded in operational processes. Coexistence architecture, the set of integration and bridging layers that allow new OOM capabilities to run alongside legacy systems, takes significant time to design, build, and stabilise. Channel transition adds further complexity, particularly for airlines with large indirect distribution footprints.
The airlines making the most progress are not necessarily the ones with the largest budgets. They are the ones that treated the programme as a long-term business transformation rather than a technology project with a fixed end date, and that invested in organisational change alongside the technical work.
The three transition pathways for airline retailing modernisation
Not all airlines start from the same place, and not all of them should follow the same path. The MAR Readiness Playbook identifies three primary sequencing pathways, each suited to a different starting point and commercial objective.
Pathway 1: Maximise legacy reusability. For airlines with significant PSS investment and complex operational dependencies, the priority is to extract maximum value from existing systems while building the new capability alongside them. This is the lowest-risk approach but requires the most careful architecture to avoid creating technical debt that slows the later stages of transition.
Pathway 2: Chase new revenue sources. For airlines where ancillary revenue growth and personalisation capability are the primary commercial drivers, the sequencing prioritises offer modernisation and channel capability first. This generates near-term commercial return that can fund the deeper structural work.
Pathway 3: Self-modernise first. For airlines with the organisational maturity and strategic clarity to move aggressively, a more comprehensive modernisation of the internal operating model, processes, data, governance, creates the foundation for faster and more durable technology transformation.
None of these pathways is inherently superior. The right choice depends on the airline's archetype, its commercial priorities, and the constraints of its technology estate.
How much value can Modern Airline Retailing unlock?
The business case for MAR is not difficult to make. The difficulty is making it specific enough to drive decisions.
McKinsey estimates that Modern Airline Retailing could unlock approximately USD 45 billion in new annual value by 2030. Ancillary revenues across the industry reached approximately USD 148 billion in 2024. Around 80% of IATA member airlines now use some form of dynamic pricing. And airlines currently lose more than USD 14 billion annually due to missed personalisation opportunities, according to Accenture.
These numbers describe the aggregate opportunity. What matters for any individual airline is understanding which part of that opportunity is accessible to them, and what it will take to capture it. A carrier that is strong on offer capability but limited by its fulfilment infrastructure will capture a different slice of the opportunity than one that has invested in order management but has not yet modernised its commercial engine.
For airlines working with Branchspace on programme delivery, the Transform practice develops detailed value cases as part of the engagement.
The technical limitations of PNR systems
The Passenger Name Record was designed in the 1960s to manage a simple question: is this passenger booked on this flight? Fifty years of airline retailing complexity have been layered on top of that original data structure, and the cracks are showing.
PNR systems were not built to handle the data structures that modern retailing requires. A personalised bundle with dynamic pricing, ancillary add-ons, flexible fulfilment rules, and real-time modification capability is architecturally incompatible with a record designed to store a seat number and a name.
The specific limitations that affect most carriers include: the inability to represent attribute-based offers as distinct sellable items; the coupling of booking and ticketing logic that makes post-purchase modification expensive to process; the lack of a unified customer view across booking channels; and the difficulty of supporting real-time fulfilment decisions at the point of service.
Decoupling from the PSS is not a short-term project. It requires a coexistence architecture that allows the new order management layer to operate in parallel with the legacy system during the transition, and designing that architecture correctly is one of the most technically demanding aspects of any MAR programme. For airlines working through this challenge, the Branchspace technical deep dive resource covers the architecture considerations in detail.
The MAR Readiness Playbook
Everything covered in this guide maps directly to the frameworks, archetypes, and implementation roadmap in the Modern Airline Retailing Readiness Playbook, First Edition.
It is free. It is 44 pages. And it was written by the practitioners currently running these programmes.
The playbook includes the full Five Dimensions framework, a scored readiness assessment, detailed archetype profiles, and a phased implementation roadmap. It is the most complete practical guide to MAR readiness available today, and it is built for the commercial and technology leaders who are responsible for making the transition happen.
