Solutions, data, and standards that support industry growth
ATPCO is the foundation of modern airline retailing, enabling you to get the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
Owned by airlines, ATPCO blends reliable data and systems with innovative technology to create value for everyone. Hundreds of airlines use our premier pricing tools to create customized offers that are displayed consistently everywhere people buy flights. No matter how offers are created, our data and standards enable innovation throughout the whole industry, anticipating future marketplace needs while supporting the ecosystem transformation required to get there.
Our vision
To be the platform for industry innovation in airline retailing by enabling foundational content, connectivity, and computation capabilities.
Our mission
We are the industry’s trusted partner in driving innovation, reducing complexity, and delivering network efficiencies to the airline ecosystem through standards, technology, and effective governance.
The people and companies we serve
See why 429 airlines and 121 channels across 142 countries trust ATPCO to be their technology, pricing, and shopping data provider.
We value our relationships with the companies who need the most trusted data in the world, sharing expertise and innovating the systems that power air travel.
- Airlines
Improve passenger experience and soar over your competition with efficient, modern offers - Channels
Meet your customers where they are and confidently create compelling displays - Industry partners
Access robust data, standards for development, historical information, and settlement support
Build tomorrow's travel industry
Join ATPCO and be at the epicenter of the airline industry, helping to bring passenger flight shopping to life.
Commercial aviation’s mission fuels ATPCO’s vision
On paper, Airline Tariff Publishing Company’s (ATPCO) story began nearly 60 years ago with the founding of its predecessor, the Airline Tariff Publishers, Inc., in 1965. In context of air travel history, however, ATPCO’s story begins with the advent of commercial aviation, when people opted to fly as an alternative to rail or boat travel, when passengers were transported for a fee, and when airlines were required to account for the fares and tariffs associated with each passenger’s ticket.
Today, ATPCO’s vision is consistent with early aviators’ mission to make air travel accessible worldwide.
Air travel is enabled through ticketing
The world’s first airline was founded in 1909 by German-based airship company DELAG. Ancestor to the airplane, an airship (dirigible balloon) was capable of controlled powered flight. For four years, more than 34,000 passengers flew by air, but to promote air travel, only 10,000 were required to pay the ticket agent, Hamburg-Amerika steamship line.
To the delight of approximately 3,000 witnesses, the world's first fixed-wing scheduled airline, St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line, took flight on 1 January 1914. The sole passenger was former mayor of St. Petersburg Abram C. Pheil, whose fare was determined by auction: USD 400 (USD 11,200 today).
ATPCO becomes the single source for fare data
To be more efficient, airlines sought to centralize the process of compiling fares for government review. In 1945, the Air Traffic Conference of America established a 20-person tariff department to manage and file domestic fares with the US government, adding cargo in 1958. In 1965, Airline Tariff Publishers, Inc. was established when the Air Traffic Conference's Tariff Department divested from the Air Transport Association of America (ATA). The latter was renamed ATPCO in 1975.
Reorganization, and eventually deregulation in 1978, spurred ATPCO to adapt from manually filing 100 passenger and cargo tariff pages to daily clearing millions of changes electronically.
From tickets to tariffs, technology fuels innovation
In 1985, ATPCO moved its main office to Dulles Airport. Advancements in technology led to looking beyond hand-delivering data tapes to airlines to exploring automating complex airline fare data.
During the 1980s and 1990s, ATPCO digitized the information filed on paper tariffs, automating manual processes and enabling electronic connectivity for industry airfares. The change from paper to electronic is visible on tickets. A 1920s ticket from Delta Air Lines, the oldest US airline still in operation, includes fare and rules. Delta's First Test Automated Ticket and Boarding Pass (ATB) was produced circa 1986 and only features travel information.
New data types and computerization enable increased travel activity
As GDSs and channel partners populated online, we produced new solutions like Fare By Rule to cascade fare updates more quickly. By the mid-2000s, we automated service fee processing, helping airlines more effectively recover unprecedented fuel and security costs.
Automation created pathways to handle the increasing flow of data throughout the industry; our database held 100 million fares by November 2010. We continued automating more data types, including baggage allowance and charges, and launched our first website to promote solutions to the air travel industry. Today, our database holds more than 300 million fares that yields 13.4 million fare/rule changes daily.
Forward focused, ATPCO builds infrastructure to support growth
New ways of connecting air travelers and tailoring their flight shopping experience prompted us to modernize our systems and resources. We extended beyond our pricing data expertise and acquired a patent for cacheless airline ticket pricing technology in 2018 that calculates all possible airline ticket prices regardless of availability.
Amidst crisis and conflict in 2020, we deployed pricing, distribution, and retailing solutions and expertise to help the industry respond then recover—all while producing standards for automation and terminology.
In 2021, we moved our data and processing to the cloud to increase reliability, drive innovation that advances modern retailing, and reduce technical debt
ATPCO is the foundation of modern airline retailing
ATPCO’s air travel story isn't a blip on the commercial aviation history radar. On 7 September 2022, our collection of nearly 1,600 bound tariff books, dating from 1944 to 2004, was acquired by the Library of Congress and is now available to the public here.
We’re continuing our story as we support industry organizations and airlines large and small. As the foundation of modern retailing, ATPCO is the tailwind that propels air travel upward and forward.