The alliance promise vs the customer reality
Alliances and partnerships were supposed to be the elegant answer to a simple constraint: aircraft can only fly so far, and traffic rights are what they are.
So we collaborate.
We codeshare. We interline. We stitch networks together.
And then a passenger stands in an airport staring at a departure board showing nine airline codes on one flight and thinks: How is this logical?
Nick Ashton told a story that will feel familiar to anyone who has tried to explain airline partnerships to someone outside the industry. He was in Bangkok, looking up at the board, and even as an airline veteran he found himself laughing at how complex it’s become for a “regular Joe” customer.
That is the core tension.
Partnerships are strategically essential, but the experience of them often feels operationally awkward, commercially constrained, and customer-unfriendly.
Nick Ashton
Retailing progress is not the same as partnership progress.
If you modernise your offer creation but do not modernise partner connectivity and servicing, you create a new kind of fragmentation. A shinier front end, with the same back-end constraints.
Nick Ashton’s career arc is basically the industry’s story
Nick’s journey is unusually “full stack airline”.
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Operational frontline at British Airways, including the opening of Terminal 5 and the BA038 incident
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Network planning during the global financial crisis
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Marketing across regions, learning how different markets shop and buy
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Cabin crew during the mixed fleet strike period, seeing the airline from back to front
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Then the deep dive into alliances and partnerships, across BA, Qatar Airways, Virgin Australia, and later Vueling inside IAG
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Into the tech ecosystem with Dohop during Covid
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And now into digital retailing and protection products with Protect Group
The through-line is not job titles. It’s perspective.
Nick has lived partnerships from the airport floor, from the network spreadsheet, from distribution migrations, and from the customer side after stepping out of airline employment and travelling like everyone else.
His point was blunt: once you experience airline journeys purely as a passenger, you see where the friction really is. You feel it in shopping, servicing, disruption handling, and those awkward gaps where liability is unclear.
Why “interline with offers and orders” is the missing bridge
Traditional interline and codeshare were built in a world of:
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PNRs
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tickets
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filed fares
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static product definitions
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limited ability to sell and service ancillaries across partners
That structure is why even huge joint ventures still struggle to do something that feels basic in 2026: cross-sell and service each other’s ancillaries cleanly.
Nick described it as a “big gap” that sits right in the middle of material revenue pools.
This is exactly why the industry keeps circling back to modern airline retailing: dynamic offers plus a single order record, supported by standards like NDC and ONE Order.
And in the last 30 days, we’ve seen continued momentum on the distribution side. For example, ANA and Travelport announced an expansion of ANA’s NDC distribution across 40 global markets, which is another reminder that retailing change is no longer theoretical.
The “three bookings, two failure points” intermodal problem
Nick’s commuting example should make every airline tech leader wince, because it’s so avoidable in principle:
Train. Bus. Flight.
Three transactions. Two obvious failure points. And if the first leg collapses, the customer wears the liability.
This is the opposite of customer choice.
It also undermines sustainability narratives, because customers cannot reliably buy the lower-carbon option as one coherent journey.
Intermodal has been “nearly there” for years, but there are real signs of movement. Over the past month, intermodal distribution keeps popping up in tangible commercial announcements, like Euroairlines partnering with AccesRail to enable combined air-rail ticketing through major airline distribution channels.
Nick’s argument is that intermodal needs the same foundation as modern airline retailing:
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One place to shop
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One coherent offer across modes
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One servicing model customers can understand
And importantly: one clear answer to “who owns the journey?” when disruption happens.
Refunds, disruption, and why customer trust is now a tech problem
You can’t talk about servicing without talking about refunds and disruption.
In the US, the regulatory environment around consumer protections and refunds remains active and complex. In early December 2025, the US Department of Transportation published a notice pausing enforcement of certain airline refunds requirements for specific scenarios involving flights operated under a different flight number, until June 30, 2026.
Whatever your view on the policy, the operational implication is the same:
Servicing complexity is now a board-level issue, and it is deeply entangled with how your partnerships, codeshares, and ticketing models work.
Which is where Protect Group sits in Nick’s current world: using data, AI/ML and marketplace-style products to improve digital retailing propositions, including protection and servicing experiences that feel more human and less “good luck, here’s a form”.
What airline tech leaders should take from this
If you are a CIO, CTO, Head of IT, Head of Revenue, or leading NDC and OOSD programmes, Nick’s story lands in three practical reminders.
1) Partnerships are not a side quest
They are a customer experience layer.
If your airline cannot confidently sell, service, and recover journeys across partners, your retailing investment will under-deliver.
2) “Modern retailing” needs “modern interoperability”
API connectivity is not the finish line. It’s the start.
The hard part is the operating model: servicing, settlement, disruption logic, and consistent customer comms across parties.
3) Change is slow, so execution talent matters more than vision
Nick was honest about it: you can have the ideal, the knowledge, the platform, and still only move as fast as the ecosystem allows.
That reality is exactly why we see demand for people who can translate between legacy and future state.
