New agreement simplifies negotiated contracts by using automation to get fares to market in hours instead of weeks

ATPCO today announced it has signed a new Express Contracts agreement with Brazilian airline GOL. Express Contracts, which was created by ATPCO in partnership with Volaro, enables GOL to streamline the implementation of its negotiated contracts with corporate and leisure partners and get them to market in a matter of hours or less.

Airline contract management has traditionally used a complex and manual process to get negotiated fares in the market, requiring long lead times that result in strained customer relationships and missed revenue opportunities. In 2021, GOL, migrated to a new PSS (Passenger Service System), which meant the carrier had to move and update all its existing contracts seamlessly at scale. Acknowledging that manually processing thousands of contracts would be a cumbersome task, the airline was looking for a more efficient process for filing its new corporate contracts in the future.

As an automated solution, Express Contracts delivers the efficiencies that GOL was looking for by significantly reducing the number of manual coding hours typically required to process contracts. Since signing the agreement in late 2021 and going live with its customized implementation strategy, GOL’s new automated workflow, enabled by Express Contracts, has simplified the contracting process. Now, 99 percent of the airline’s existing contracts are being processed and distributed to the market within 30 minutes.

“It seems too good to be true, but the automation turns contracts to bookable fares in less than a day. Since implementing Express Contracts, our small team can handle many more contracts in a fraction of the time, making changes in core pricing strategies feasible,” said Rogerio Maldonado, Revenue Operations Manager at GOL. “With the support of ATPCO, we’ve been able to institute new workflow changes that save us time and money.”

Multiple airlines are using ATPCO’s Express Contracts solution, including United Airlines, Singapore Airlines, China Eastern, and Iberia. More than 150,000 airline contracts have been processed to date using Express Contracts, resulting in an estimated $25 million in cost savings and incremental revenues. 

“The numbers really do speak for themselves. In a very short period of time, GOL has derived a lot of value from our automated solution,” said Marcelo Franceschini Freire, ATPCO’s Americas Sales and Partner Success Director. “Modernizing an airline’s contract management process dramatically increases scalability and significantly reduces the time from when a contract is signed to when the fare is filed. This means happier corporate and leisure customers and greater confidence in the time it takes to get fares to market.”