Getting Started with NDCTerm

Orient yourself in the NDCTerm workspace and complete your first NDC booking — search, select, price, book, and issue from one command line.

What's different from your GDS

NDCTerm speaks a cryptic language you already mostly know — 15NOVJFKLAX, -DOE/JANE MS, WP, 1ER. What's underneath is different, and it changes a few habits:

You book offers, not segments. Every price on screen is a live offer constructed by the airline, with an expiry. Sell the flight, price it, book the priced offer — if an offer expires mid-booking, NDCTerm reprices and prompts you if the total moved.
There is one record: the order. No separate ticket record, no stored fare quote to rebuild. Tickets, EMDs, seats, and services all hang off the airline's order, and NDCTerm displays them from the order itself.
No change mode. Retrieve an order, make your changes, commit with ER. The airline reprices the change; you confirm.
Airline facts stay airline facts. Seat prices, fare rules, change fees, and carrier-produced reversal quotes come from the airline. When a carrier cannot quote a document reversal before commit, NDCTerm labels the displayed amount as a stored-fare estimate instead of presenting it as airline-confirmed.

The workspace

The terminal is a command line with a scrolling response area and a transaction sidebar. Responses are structured — flight results are selectable rows, seat maps are clickable — but every action they offer is also a typed command, and this manual teaches the typed form.

The sidebar is your live transaction record. It tracks, as you build a booking:

Segments you've sold, with their status codes
Passengers and their data (DOB, documents, contacts)
Services — seats, bags, and other ancillaries, with prices
Offers returned by pricing
Order summary — the order ID and status (in progress, booked, ticketed, cancelled) plus the running total

If the sidebar is empty, your transaction is empty. It is the fastest way to answer "what have I actually got so far?" before you commit.

NDCTerm workspace with the command line, flight results in the response area, and the transaction sidebar tracking segments, a passenger, and the running total — The workspace: command line, response area, and the transaction sidebar tracking the booking as you build it.

You can run several transactions in parallel workspaces (#1, #2, #NEW), each with its own sidebar and its own booking in progress.

The shape of a session

Every booking follows the same skeleton:

15NOVJFKLAX        # 1. Search
1                  # 2. Select
-DOE/JANE MS       # 3. Passengers
WP                 # 4. Price — the airline returns its offers
1ER                # 5. Book offer 1, end & retrieve
ISSUE/ALL          # 6. Issue documents (needs a form of payment)

Two commit verbs matter from day one: ER commits and displays the result; E commits silently. Use ER until reading the order back is a reflex.

Steps 5 and 6 can be one step — 1ETR books and tickets in a single call. Ticketing and payment get their own page: Issue and Verify Tickets.

Always search with a date

The search grammar accepts a bare city pair — JFKLAX — and defaults it to today. That is a trap, not a shortcut: late in the day, today's departures have mostly left, and the airline returns few or no offers. It looks like a dead route; it's an empty afternoon.

Make the date prefix a habit. Every search, every time:

15NOVJFKLAX             # Nov 15, JFK to LAX — always lead with DDMMM
15NOVJFKLAX/20NOVLAXJFK # Round-trip: date on each leg

Clearing state

Two commands reset the transaction, at different depths:

I — ignore. Clears search results, selections, offers, and passengers. Keeps pending order-change context, so it's safe mid-servicing.
CLEAR — clears everything: the transaction, pending changes, and any entered payment.

A bare X is rejected — in NDCTerm, X is the delete prefix (X1 deletes segment 1, XA deletes all segments), and the parser refuses the standalone form so a stray keystroke can't wipe your work. When you're modifying a retrieved order and want to abandon the changes, IR ignores them and re-retrieves the original order.

Start every practice run in this guide with I so you're working from a clean pad.

Your first booking

End to end, one adult, one way. Type it exactly; the date can be any date ahead of you.

The sequence below, recorded in real time: search, select, add the passenger and a contact, then WP returns the airline’s priced brands — about 30 seconds, most of it waiting on the carrier.

I                       # Clean pad
15NOVJFKLAX             # Search JFK–LAX, Nov 15
1                       # Select flight 1 — it appears in the sidebar
-DOE/JANE MS            # Add the passenger
@DOB01JAN1980           # Date of birth (applies to the last passenger added)
@F                      # Gender
@PAXTEL+15551234567     # Contact phone
@PAXEMAIL/[email protected]  # Contact email
WP                      # Price — the airline returns its fare-brand ladder

WP is where NDC shows its hand: the airline returns a ladder of priced offers — its fare brands for your itinerary, each with its own price and conditions. Compare them; the row numbers are how you book.

After WP: the airline's priced offers, numbered. Book one by row number.

1ER                     # Book offer 1, end & retrieve

1ER creates the order with the airline and displays it: order ID, airline booking reference, itinerary, passenger. This is a held booking — confirmed space, no documents yet.

Confirmed order card after 1ER showing the order ID, airline booking reference, itinerary, and passenger for a held booking — The order card after `1ER`: order ID, booking reference, itinerary — held, awaiting issuance.

From here, retrieve it any time with * followed by the order ID (e.g. *ABC123), and ticket it with ISSUE — covered next in Issue and Verify Tickets. Two things to file away now: 1ETR books and tickets in one call when you already have payment in hand, and some carriers collect payment at order creation rather than at a separate issuance step — both are on the issuance page.

Where to go next

Issue and Verify Tickets — payment, the issuance cart, and how to confirm documents actually issued.
The prefix system — what *, -, @, $, !, +, and % each mean, so you can read a command you haven't met yet.
Command Reference — the full lookup table. Keep it open in a second tab; this manual teaches the workflows, that page holds the syntax.