The travel industry creates a lot of data and connecting the dots to actually use it for business strategy has been difficult. Real-time insights are delivered to airlines, agencies, and destinations by the Airline Reporting Corporation.
The airlines reporting corporation.
There is a mountain of data from airlines over the past two and a half years. Establishing any kind of pattern for travel behaviors has been difficult because of border closings, mask mandates, and work from anywhere models. The world is slowly falling into place.
Chuck Thackston, managing director of data science at the Airlines Reporting Corporation, said that the 2020 and 2021 data is a bit of an outlier for long-term analysis.
There is a new picture of booking preferences coming into view. With 15 billion passenger trips on 490 airlines at 3,330 airports, the entire travel experience is helping to understand how to meet a new set of customer expectations.
While many of the headlines surrounding summer travel focused on airlines cutting flights and scaling back service in certain markets, there is another side to the story, where airlines should be looking to create more route options.
The data can be used to look at underserved markets. Airlines have taken a measured approach to adding routes after the summer bumps. They can use our data to connect the dots. It gives airlines a chance to respond to demand and not have to worry about which markets will drive their business.
The most important part of the experience is the traveler. The company has a new feature that allows users to predict which itineraries will be most popular.
As leisure demand continues to fuel the first phase of the recovery, Thackston points out that there are opportunities for travel agencies as well.
He said there is a chance to look at areas that are not obvious. These may be places that are great travel destinations, especially on the leisure travel side, where they can look at these places and say, 'Well, it's a great place to go,' but it hasn't been on top of many people's lists." Maybe it will be a good buy for budget-conscious travelers.
Other key players in the industry can take advantage of the data provided by Arc. The company has created a tool to help convention and visitors bureaus understand how web searches, service schedules, and capacity compare with their competitors.
There are pieces of the traditional corporate travel landscape that are still missing. Booking a trip from New York to London for a three-hour meeting isn't likely to happen because of the rise of virtual meeting platforms The trip is still on the table.
Bleisure opportunities are starting to be looked at a bit more by people. Combining trips for a higher return on investment is something some companies are trying to do. The booking is a bit more complicated because of it.
There are trips that are not coming back soon and we are looking at them in more detail. It is still a long way out to travel into and around China.
That is a clear hurdle for the U.S. travel industry, which has previously made a big bet on high spending Chinese travelers. The country has zero-covid measures that include a negative test and a 14-day quark for passengers. Travel companies will need to forecast the absence of Chinese tourists until the policy is changed.
The ability to gather all these new insights sounds promising, but for a travel industry with a lot of disconnected legacy technologies, it is hard to harness the real power of large data sets.
Every time we work with a customer, we ask ourselves a fundamental question: what is the easiest way to get access to the data and extract value? Thackston made a statement. It's important to fit in with the IT group. The only way it will work is that way.
Time is the most limited resource in every company.
Thackston said there are things that can be done quickly to add value to a customer. We take anIncremental approach that allows us to jump in and immediately make an impact in two or three key areas with the plan to accomplish more in the future
He said that many airlines have technology platforms. Making it more efficient is what they are getting better at. Some airlines are grabbing the data directly and using it in real time. It saves them time and money if they don't have to receive a file or ingest it. We want to make it easier for airlines and travel agencies to get more of that data.
You can learn more about how the data solution can boost your company's air travel intelligence by visiting the website.
Airlines Reporting Corporation and SkiftX collaborated to create this article.
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