American Airlines continues to invest in our commitment to delivering modernized shopping and booking experiences to travel retailers and corporate customers utilizing New Distribution Capability (NDC) technology. Starting in April 2023, we’ll take the next step in our transformative journey to design and sell differentiated content in new ways that benefit customers. Customers shopping via modern retailing channels will retain access to our best available third-party public channel content.  

Today, we’re pleased to launch our Modern Retailing Content Implementation Guide for agency partners  - a resource that is now available on Agency Reference. This guide supports the implementation of our modern retailing strategy and includes important information regarding a new Fare Basis Code convention, as well as technical details to help you identify these fares.  

As a reminder, after April 2023, we’ll offer three levels of differentiated content that can be accessed via 1) American-owned channels, 2) American-owned and modern retailing channels, and 3) third-party technology (EDIFACT + NDC) channels.  

All American fares will be filed in the public tariff, viewable in all channels, but with booking and ticketing restrictions applied in CAT 15 of the fare rules. To identify which channel the fare can be transacted in, you can reference the 8th character position of the Fare Basis Code. If the 8th position is a numeric character, then it can be transacted in third-party technology (EDIFACT + NDC) channels. If the 8th position is an alphabetic character, it can be transacted in the American-owned and modern retailing channels. This new construct will apply to all American U.S. Domestic and Mexico, Caribbean and Latin America (MCLA) fares starting in April 2023. The below table provides more details on the alphabetic and numeric characters used.  

Test fares are currently filed in the markets below for you to use in your testing: 

Please visit NDC.aa.com to learn more about modern retailing with American.