Three ways airlines can offer more value, more choice and generate more revenue – Part 1

To bring more compelling, personalized content to travelers, airlines need technology that can adapt to changing market dynamics. At Sabre, we believe this future is powered by a shift to offer and orders that gives airlines the intelligence and insights they need to compete for and retain today’s modern traveler.

Here’s Sabre’s Bhaskara Guntreddy with part one of a three-part series on how innovation, experimentation and partnership underpin the path to growth, and how that is embodied in one of Sabre’s leading product suites – Retail Intelligence.

Innovating offers to maximize revenue opportunities

As the saying goes, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too.’ This is especially true in the airline industry, where customers’ demands for affordability, speed, and quality create a challenging balancing act for airlines. As Vice President of Product Management for Offer Optimization at Sabre, one of my goals is to address this by helping airlines to maximize revenue through products that help deliver more personalized and optimized offers to their customers, faster. How?

I believe there are three areas of travel retail innovation that they need to focus on to meet those expectations, and accelerate their growth:

1. Offer Optimization

2. Experimentation

3. Partnership

The good news is, there is one solution to cover all three areas – Sabre Retail Intelligence. In a nutshell, Retail Intelligence uses real-time insights and machine learning models to increase revenue opportunities by moving from static pricing rules to targeted offers. Created as part of our strategic partnership with Google, it’s fully scalable and flexible too. Let me go into a little more detail about how it’s helping airlines to deliver better customer value, and get ahead of their competition:

Maximizing revenue opportunities with dynamic pricing on an unprecedented scale

The main benefit for airlines using Retail Intelligence is maximizing revenue opportunities. We help them achieve that with two key products: Sabre Air Price IQ™ and Sabre Ancillary IQ™.

I’m proud to say that both have been particularly successful in delivering actual revenue uplift. Here’s how…

We created Air Price IQ to help move airlines away from traditional static offers to advanced machine learning models that personalize airfare offers in real-time. Dynamically creating offers with continuous pricing is helping those airlines to overcome limited fare points, complex fares management and limitations of booking classes. The result is better conversion.

Our customers are achieving that, in implementation, with Air Price IQ’s four core features:

It’s rewarding to see the results speak for themselves – those airlines using Air Price IQ to optimize their air pricing are experiencing up to a 3% increase in airfare revenue*.

*Results are based on production implementation of partner airline customers and vary, depending on price sensitivity in the market.

But right to fly offers are just one part of the puzzle. Travelers today want more than just value, they also want more choice. In part two of this blog series , where I’ll explore how we’re helping airlines to give them just that…