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Time is money - making the best connecting flight available in real-time

If you can’t see it, you can’t buy it. Flights can only be booked if they are available for customers on the Internet or at travel agents. In an age where airline alliances have become common, all codeshare connected flights need to be published by both partners, before customers can book a connecting flight. This poses a number of challenges to both airlines. To handle operational schedule changes and voluminous codeshare agreements in today’s airline market more efficiently, airlines require a comprehensive codeshare management and schedule distribution system.

With SchedConnect, Lufthansa Systems offers an innovative solution for codeshare management and schedule distribution that delivers significant savings and revenue increase. Using SchedConnect, airlines can react quickly to operational and market changes and optimize their codeshare agreements. The modular system acts as an interface between flight scheduling, sales, the operational systems of an airline, and external, passenger-related systems. It guarantees the seamless, automatic and continuous exchange of data that results in a reduction of lost bookings and customer service costs.

The Codeshare Optimizer improves airlines’ efficiency in codeshare agreements: comprehensive code share flight management with conflict handling, adjustable preference evaluation and automated generation of marketing flights speeds up codeshare handling. On top of that, the codeshare connection builder shortens the time-to-market for new co-operations. If an airline and their codeshare partner both use SchedConnect, the new schedule can be distributed to the partner as well as the reservation system in real-time.

The new solution has been used by Deutsche Lufthansa since January 2006. The airline now manages and optimizes more than 1.5 million single codeshare agreements and over one hundred schedule distribution rules with SchedConnect.