Corporate Blog

Airline business leaders have traditionally had a limited choice of suppliers when choosing their PSS platform. In a product-centric world that was focused on indirect distribution, little emphasis was placed on customer-centricity. Instead, the spotlight shone on high-volume transactions management on what were mainframe-based platforms. With the evolution of the industry towards more direct relationships between airlines and their customers, new platforms emerged that no longer utilize mainframe technologies, enabling new capabilities that were previously unavailable. Customer and business d...

"The bigger the economic decline, the greater the acceleration, of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. This is the cycle where a recession causes declining industries and marginally successful business models to disappear faster than they would have if the national economy had continued to grow." by Author This truly remarkable quote comes from Alec Levenson, a senior researcher at the USC Marshall Center for Effective Organizations. It is a quote that echoes what I have been chewing over, ever since we saw the impact of COVID-19 hitting our industry with brutal force...

The simplest answer to this question is that few airlines currently have the technology capability to do so. By nature, the airline industry demands very complex functions and extremely high reliability from Passenger Service System (PSS) platforms. Managing various price points across a fare ladder and forecasting demand for these price points makes the system even more complicated. Dynamic pricing systems must provide for an infinite set of conditions and contexts – whether these may apply in practice or not. The price may end up being any value at all, but these are calculated in real time ...

Airline companies have traditionally employed flexible pricing concepts in very creative ways to offset the risks associated with unsold inventory and overbooking. But it would be plain wrong to call it "dynamic pricing" in the truest sense. A big part of the problem is that airline companies just don't have sufficient control over the pricing process. How are airfares typically calculated? In the traditional model, airline companies publish their schedules (via intermediaries) to the GDS and file their fares with the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCo). When a passenger or a travel agen...