Streamlining processes and empowering airlines with more control and innovation over personalized offer creation is an exciting opportunity for the travel industry.
But realizing the retail vision is a long-term journey requiring a fundamental industry reset. While paths may vary, accelerating progress and leveraging quick wins along the way is critical.
As the industry looks to modernize its retailing and back-end capabilities, only a handful of progressive airlines have begun the transition to distributing their dynamically created offers using NDC. Even fewer airlines have started looking at ONE Order to simplify the fulfillment of customer-centric retailing.
As the travel industry works to unlock incremental revenues, drive efficiencies through process simplification, and deliver richer traveler experiences, modernizing the technology landscape is a critical success factor to achieving these end-objectives. Enabling the retailing of air and non-air offers across airline partnerships and streamlining the processes involved will unlock multiplier effects for airlines and their partner ecosystems.
Air and non-air ancillary services revenues are now firmly part of most airline business models. Whether airlines adopt a micro or macro segmentation approach, personalization boosts ancillary sales conversion. And the key to personalization is data.
As airlines strive to be more responsive to changes in demand, reliance and focus on digital and data-driven strategies, especially in the areas of distribution, retailing, and pricing, will allow them to create expanded, personalized ancillary offers to renew their revenue streams and re-establish customer confidence.
For decades, airlines have employed relatively static pricing concepts to offset the risks associated with unsold inventory and overbooking. The use of distinct pockets of inventory allocated to different prices has led to the misconception that the industry is already using dynamic pricing techniques. But don’t be fooled -existing applications sometimes called “dynamic pricing” are not dynamic at all.
