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Increasing capacity utilization and earnings with revenue integrity solutions

There’s more than one way to do things. This is also true when searching for the best flight connection at a travel agency. Frequently, agents reserve seats on a number of flights for a customer before finally making a binding reservation and issuing a ticket for the best option. However, if unused reservations are not canceled from the booking system on time, they block seats and reduce the airline’s current offerings, thereby ultimately leading to revenue losses. Automatic booking verification allows airlines to resell between 10% and 15% of the daily bookings.

The revenue integrity solution from Lufthansa Systems addresses exactly this situation. This solution is based on the PaxBase reservation database, which mirrors all the reservation data of an airline. This simplifies and accelerates evaluation and at the same time relieves the reservation system. Lufthansa Systems has developed three different modules that analyze the reservation information in PaxBase in different ways. Ticket Time Control was recently introduced at Lufthansa and checks whether the required tickets for a booking were issued over a specified time period. Furthermore, the DupeCheck module verifies whether there are optional multi-bookings for a passenger on the same or similar routes in the system. The third module that Lufthansa Systems offers in this area is the Fictitious Names module, which serves the purpose of releasing seats that were blocked by unintended test bookings by the airlines.

In 2006, Regional Airlines and Condor opted for Lufthansa Systems’ revenue integrity solution and both Lufthansa Passage Airline and Austrian Airlines have been customers for many years now.

More than just raw data: how IT enables airlines to really benefit from market information

Information about your competitors is vital for companies in all markets, and the airline is no exception to this rule. Only with the help of IT can they tap into the wealth of market data that is available. One of the world’s leading IT providers for the airline and aviation industry, Lufthansa Systems is supporting airlines of all sizes address this need by providing them with powerful tools for the in-depth and useful analysis of market data (booking data). This allows them to precisely analyze their market position relative to their competition and decide which markets and routes to target with which products, and which markets to enter or develop.

Only airlines can buy the Market Information Data Tapes (MIDT) from global distribution systems (GDS) such as Amadeus, Sabre or Worldspan. The MIDT comprise all transactions including bookings, wait lists and cancellations which were made through the GDS. But purchasing the data isn't all there is to do. In order to deliver the required information, the raw booking data (Data Advance) need to be processed in multiple steps and analyzed by using powerful tools such as NetAdvance from Lufthansa Systems.

The IT provider and its customer jointly define rules based on which the extensive raw data are processed such that they form useful units, which are called "trips." The trips, which can then be analyzed, are stored in the Data Warehouse database on our Kelsterbach-based server, where they can be retrieved by the customer. All that is needed to access the highly detailed booking data at any time is a PC with Internet access or a notebook with a GSM-enabled mobile phone.

Unlike in almost any other sector, the provision of these high-quality raw data by the GDSs allows airlines to monitor their competition based on real facts. That network carriers spend several million euros annually for MIDT data shows how important such a market analysis is for strategic and planning purposes. In order to enable network carriers to analyze the market of low-cost carriers or direct bookings as well, the experts from Lufthansa Systems are designing special reports which reveal information about markets that have not been covered in the past. This solution from Lufthansa Systems is currently being used by SWISS, Thai Airways, Finnair and Turkish Airlines.