Modern Airline Retailing: The OOSD Implementation Series – Part 1: Air France–KLM and the MOON Programme

Executive Summary

As 2026 begins, the aviation industry is moving from proof of concept to active production in Modern Airline Retailing. Among the members of the IATA Airline Retailing Consortium, Air France–KLM has emerged as a leading reference case, translating ambition into group-wide execution through its MOON (Moving to Offer and Order Native) programme.

Following the appointment of Adriaan den Heijer as Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer in late 2025, the Group has sharpened the commercial focus of MOON. Drawing on deep expertise in Pricing and Revenue Management, the programme is positioned not as an IT initiative, but as a structural shift in how the airline designs, prices, sells, services, and accounts for its products.

By selecting Amadeus Nevio as a core Offer and Order management layer and investing in advanced data and AI capabilities with Google Cloud, Air France–KLM is progressively reducing its dependency on legacy Passenger Service System constraints. Tangible progress is already visible. By late 2025, the Group had deployed machine-learning–based filtering to materially reduce low-intent shopping requests, mitigating one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: look-to-book scalability.

Modern Airline Retailing: The OOSD Implementation Series

Part 1: Air France–KLM and the MOON Programme

This series examines how members of the IATA Airline Retailing Consortium are translating the Offers and Orders target operating model—spanning Offer Creation, Order Management, Settlement, and Delivery—into operational reality. Moving beyond high-level announcements, it focuses on execution: sequencing change, managing coexistence with legacy systems, and aligning commercial, operational, and financial priorities.

Air France–KLM provides a particularly instructive starting point. The Group operates at scale, across multiple brands, regulatory regimes, and alliance relationships, with two of Europe’s busiest hubs. Its experience offers practical insight into how Modern Airline Retailing can be industrialised within the constraints of a global network carrier.

Setting the Context: From Legacy Distribution to Retail Operating Models

For more than four decades, airline distribution and servicing have been shaped by architectures optimised for fare filing, ticket issuance, and batch processing. Passenger Name Records, electronic tickets, and EDIFACT messaging have delivered operational reliability, but at the cost of pricing flexibility, speed of innovation, and a unified customer view.

Through the IATA Airline Retailing Consortium, leading airlines are now pursuing a coordinated transition toward an Offers and Orders operating model. The objective is a structural decoupling of retailing and servicing from document-centric logic, enabling airlines to adopt retail practices long established in other consumer industries while preserving the operational discipline required for network aviation.

The MOON Mission: Commercial Control and Architectural Sovereignty

For Air France–KLM, the shift to Offers and Orders is codified under the MOON programme. Under den Heijer’s leadership, the initiative is explicitly framed as a commercial transformation rather than a technology refresh. The underlying business case centres on reducing the accumulated “legacy tax” of decades-old systems while creating the conditions for more granular and dynamic offer construction.

A central ambition of MOON is to move toward a single, order-based source of truth. By aligning with IATA One Order standards, the Group aims to consolidate information historically spread across PNRs, electronic tickets, and EMDs into a unified travel record. This order-centric architecture supports more consistent servicing, clearer financial settlement, and greater flexibility in how products and services are bundled and modified over time.

As with all large-scale airline transformations, Air France–KLM is operating a coexistence model. Ticket-based processes continue to run in parallel as order-native capabilities are progressively industrialised, reducing operational and financial risk.