Data, Data Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink
There’s so much data in airline systems and from the GDSs, but often it’s in unusable, or at least hard to use, formats. But that’s life in the big city in the travel industry where many of the systems that generate the data are based on 50 year old technologies and data architectures. But there’s valuable information hidden in that data which can help boost operational efficiency and revenue optimization strategies.
Driving efficiency is not just for LCCs anymore. I can’t remember the last time the financial performance of any of the big airlines was very strong. Frankly, it seems more that the larger the airline, the faster the hemorrhaging of cash. The best performers have been industry “upstarts” like Southwest and JetBlue.
While the large Airlines might have large IT teams to process this data, they don’t always do it. And smaller and mid-sized airlines always find it a huge challenge – to first find the resources and then to be able to build the appropriate solution. The data comes from GDSs like Amadeus in an EDIFACT file format. It is not normalized and hence cannot be queried. There is an issue of accessing historical data as well.
And unfortunately, much of this data is simply streamed (or available in files at regular intervals – in some cases every hour), not stored anywhere to be accessed later. So it’s use it or lose it.
Ness Software Product Labs is helping a European LCC turn all the data at their disposal into useful information. Two areas of focus have been trying to learn what they can from the booking data and information from Departure Control Systems. Some of the information that can be gleaned from just these two systems are:
- From the booking data
- Domestic Revenue Estimation
- International Revenue Estimation
- Code-share statistics
- Bookings originating from Airline special marketing initiatives
- Productivity by office
- From the Departure Control System feeds:
- Agent performance
- No Shows
- Excess baggage revenues
- Boarding throughput
- Fuel data
- Last minute changes
- Aircraft performance
Is this something that you think would be helpful, but you don’t have the resources or solution framework to address, let’s chat.
Image source: New York Times
No comments yet.