The immediate focus of any employee travel system should be on bringing greater visibility in securing seat(s), as well as providing the user with the means to resolve any unfortunate outcomes, such as being denied a seat, in the most efficient way possible. by Author Having explored the predictability problem in the first part of this blog series, let us now explore the other two crucial aspects of airline staff travel management.  Enabling better reaction speeds for corrective action When the domino effect is set off by a last minute non-availability of seats on the flight for the ...

Discounted or free travel privileges of airline employees (and their travel nominees) come with a significant caveat – the tickets are mostly on a 'space available' basis and therefore not confirmed until just before flight closure, and a full fare paying passenger will always be assigned a higher priority when it comes to limited availability of seats. This is because the seat availability information is known only at the last moment, and in high traffic situations the uncertainty can escalate to frustration for the airline employee or their nominee(s) who hopes to travel.   In other wor...

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...