EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport), better known in the aviation sector with a specific variant of IATA, PADIS, is the international standard for electronic data interchange between different computer systems. In the travel industry, it is the base language for the global exchange of important booking information, such as flight schedules, availability, and pricing, between Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and airline Passenger Service Systems (PSS) in a heavily compressed, text-based format.
Developed in the 1980s under the United Nations, EDIFACT was created for the time when internet bandwidth was expensive and slow. Its first and foremost design philosophy is efficiency.
An EDIFACT message removes all the unnecessary characters to make the file size the smallest possible. This helps millions of transactions to flow between travel agents (via GDS) and airlines every second with near-zero latency. This efficiency is why the standard has been around for decades and formed the backbone of the traditional GDS Green Screen (cryptic screen) environment.
To the human eye, an EDIFACT message resembles a string of random characters. It is not human readable without a decoder key.
While EDIFACT is fast, it is very rigid. It cannot easily transmit rich media. You cannot send a picture of a hotel room, a video of a seat in business class, or a description of a vegan meal inside an EDIFACT string. It only understands the text codes.
The industry is moving towards XML (used in NDC) and towards the use of JSON. These modern languages are wordy and flexible; it is possible for airlines to send images, bundles, and tailored offers. However, due to the deep roots of EDIFACT in the “plumbing” of airports and airlines, the changeover is slow.
Mostly airlines and GDSs (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport). It is also widely applied in customs and logistics functions to track air cargo.
Teletype (TTY) is an even more archaic form of unstructured messaging that is often used for urgent manual messages between airline operation centers. EDIFACT is structured data that can be automatically processed by computers.
Not immediately. While NDC (New Distribution Capability) is replacing EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport) for selling flights (shopping), the operational side (departure control, baggage handling, interline messaging) will probably need to rely on the EDIFACT infrastructure for many years because of its stability.
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