Airlines everywhere are rethinking how their offers can meet the expectations of modern travelers in new ways, but the journey to modern airline retailing can be fragmented, costly, and slow.
I recently sat down with T2RL’s CEO, Richard Clarke, at T2RL Engage 2025 to talk about what’s holding the industry back. Too many airlines are trying to build their own product catalogs or waiting for someone else to solve the problem. The result: disconnected systems, duplicated effort, and missed opportunities.
During my session, Empowering airline retailing: The central role of product catalog, AI, and visuals in offer innovation, we had a very insightful conversation about how the shift toward dynamic offers is no longer a vision for the future—it’s happening now.
And the good news is, there’s a smarter path forward. ATPCO has already paved the way. But first, let’s break down the basics.
What is ATPCO’s Product Catalog?
Without getting deep into technicalities and in its most basic form, a Product Catalog is a digital record of all the products and services that an airline may want to offer.
In the current world, the traditional world of fare filing, each fare is a combination of the product and the price. ATPCO’s role in supporting this evolution is helping separate the product and price, where we can then create a product catalog based on what you’re doing in your traditional ATPCO environment.
This becomes the foundation and ushers in your starting point on this journey toward dynamic offers. It’s how you can understand the types of offers you have in the marketplace.
Ultimately, a product catalog should become your single source of truth of what types of products and services you may want to offer at any time. Then, based on what you know about the customer that’s shopping or the persona of the customer that’s shopping, you can pull that off as you need it and apply the right price point at the right time.
“We’re helping figure out how product catalogs work together to ensure that the type of interoperability that this industry needs to work efficiently is in place as we evolve.” – Chris Phillips, Chief Commercial Officer at ATPCO
How does a product catalog work between an airline and its partners?
During our session, Richard asked, “If I have a subset of products that I always offer through my partners, that would be something you could help distribute via product catalog?” And the answer is yes, in a few different ways.
In the product catalog world, without the right standards in place, partners may not know how to interpret different offers. ATPCO can help mirror an airline’s own product catalog and become a messaging hub for them. Without it, there could be a lot of disconnects in terms of how one airline interprets the offer and presents it and supports it on the operations side. So, the first thing we’re doing is helping identify and establish the right standards to help that interoperability.
An airline can also take their product catalog, share it with us, and then we can use that to help them work with other partners who are still not quite there yet. We help to turn that back into a traditional ATPCO fare that their airline partners can then work with.
“Essentially, ATPCO can help pass the information selectively, and rather than us building individual connections with every partner and mapping every set of cues to each other, you can actually take that role centrally, map all the products together, so that there’s actually a single source of mapped truth for anything that translates from one set of products to another.” – Richard Clarke, CEO T2RL
Why is ATPCO the right fit to build the airline industry’s product catalog?
As a trusted, neutral source, there are five key reasons ATPCO is perfectly positioned to build the airline industry’s product catalog:
1. We’re built for the industry.
ATPCO is industry-owned and doesn’t operate for profit. We don’t chase margins, we build value. Every dollar invested goes back into shared tools that help the entire industry move forward. Together.
2. With one connection, we have total reach.
With connections to over 450 airlines, ATPCO is already the backbone of global offer management. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we are giving airlines a way to plug into a shared hub that syncs with everyone. It’s faster, cheaper, and better for… you guessed it… everyone!
3. No one knows airline products better.
From decades of fare distribution to innovations in visual merchandising and market intelligence, our team has the experience and infrastructure to make the product catalog work at scale. We are not just experimenting. We’re evolving.
4. The industry’s source of truth.
ATPCO is leading the definition of industry-wide processing standards that ensure product catalogs are interoperable across systems, partners, and platforms. When the ecosystem speaks the same language, everything works better. This has been our bread and butter since day one.
5. Creating progress without disruption.
You don’t need to wait for a full-scale system overhaul to start participating. ATPCO helps airlines separate product from price within existing systems so they can participate in dynamic offers now, not years from now.
“[An airline can] work with us on getting a version of a product catalog with what [they] offer today to start understanding things and become part of the conversation. Because while it will take a while, if you want to have a voice and start influencing things, you need to be at the table… and there just aren’t enough airlines doing that yet.” – Chris Phillips
Product Catalog isn’t just a project, it’s a platform for progress
The move to dynamic offers requires a shared foundation—one that clearly understands where the industry is today while simultaneously building where we need to go tomorrow. That foundation is ATPCO’s Product Catalog, and that’s why we’re building it with and for the industry.
If you want to see this vision in action, join us at Elevate 2026 in Atlanta. At our annual conference, we’ll go even further into the details about during multiple sessions. Don’t miss your chance to put data in motion and offers in action with us this 20-22 April.