AeroToys
IATA MAR

IATA Modern Airline Retailing,
in plain English.

Modern Airline Retailing (MAR) is IATA's umbrella programme to move the industry off PNRs, e-tickets, and EMDs onto a single, customer-centric Offer & Order model. It is the biggest distribution change since the GDS. Here's what it actually contains, and where the standards still leave you on your own.

The 30-second version

The legacy stack was built around the reservation: a PNR holds a flight segment, an e-ticket records the right to fly it, and an EMD records every ancillary. Each lives in a different system, settles through a different process, and was designed for an era when airlines sold seats — not experiences.

MAR collapses all of that into two records:

  • The Offer — what the airline is willing to sell, to whom, in this context, right now. Versioned, traceable, time-bound.
  • The Order — what the customer bought. One immutable record covering the flight, every ancillary, every change, every refund. No more PNR/ticket/EMD reconciliation.

The standards stack

MAR is not one standard. It's a family:

  • NDC (New Distribution Capability) — XML schemas for shopping, pricing, and booking via direct connect or aggregators. The distribution layer.
  • ONE Order — the canonical Order record that replaces PNR + e-ticket + EMD.
  • Offer Management System (OMS) — the airline capability that constructs and prices Offers.
  • Order Management System — the capability that owns the Order through fulfilment, servicing, and settlement.
  • Dynamic Offer Creation (DOC) — the move away from filed fares toward context-aware, real-time offer construction.

What MAR does not give you

The standards describe what the records look like. They do not give you:

  • An open implementation of the Offer or Order engine.
  • A canonical tax ruleset.
  • A community schedule corpus or fare reference data.
  • A document-native database tuned for airline workloads.
  • A rules engine to orchestrate the whole thing.

Those are the gaps AeroToys is filling. The standards give you the contract; we're building the open, composable runtime.

Where airlines get stuck

  • Vendor lock-in dressed as MAR readiness. Plenty of vendors sell “NDC in a box” that is just an NDC façade in front of the same PSS. You move the API but not the architecture.
  • Half-migrated estates. Running PNR + Order side-by-side for years is expensive and error-prone. The cutover plan matters more than the technology.
  • Tax and settlement drift. Every airline maintains its own copy of airline tax rules. They diverge. Settlement breaks. The community Tax Engine exists to fix this.

FAQs

Is MAR the same thing as NDC?
No. NDC is the distribution layer (the XML schemas for shopping and booking). MAR is the broader programme that includes NDC, ONE Order, dynamic offers, and the underlying Offer & Order architecture.
Do I need to wait for ONE Order ratification before starting?
No. The Order data model is stable enough to build against today. The standards work continues, but the architectural shift — append-only orders, decoupled offer/order, dynamic offers — is independent of any specific schema version.
Where does AeroToys fit?
We provide the open foundation under the standards. DocumentForge is the database. RuleForge is the orchestration. The community apps (Tax Engine, Open Schedules) are the shared truth sources. The Offer & Order Systems are the airline-deployable suite that uses all of it.