The sense of togetherness is helping us to deal with this pandemic. Now is certainly not the time to be alone — leaning on each other’s strength is helping many businesses to stay strong right now.
In recent weeks, ATPCO has been working with companies from all corners of the industry to help roll out new innovative solutions to aid travel recovery. While working together on handling the effects of current market conditions, we found some silver linings that proved this industry’s ability to reinvent and move quickly.
I would like to highlight just a few of ATPCO’s many companies whose ability to transform and innovate with agility have been inspiring.
ATPCO Price Elements in partnership with PROS
ATPCO and PROS have a long history of working together with proven success. Earlier this month, we took another step forward with a deeper partnership by jointly creating Price Elements, a product that merges fare and rule data into a simplified file format. Price Elements delivers current pricing data that is structured to improve revenue management and inventory forecasting processing.
As a recent Revenue Management in Travel study suggests, airlines will need to be extremely flexible in their planning. The pandemic has grounded the majority of most airlines’ fleets. As airlines begin to recover, most will face restructured networks, uncertain demand, and new buying behaviors that will challenge revenue management processes that traditionally have been focused on historical data. They must adapt faster than ever and look beyond the historical data models.
How? The industry can leverage the robust supply of rapidly changing pricing data from more than 400 airlines that use ATPCO fare distribution services. Price Elements empowers improved PROS forecasting, dynamic pricing readiness and more efficient yield management process, with a faster implementation.
PROS and ATPCO share my goal—to advance revenue management capabilities for the industry. That’s why we continue to work together, leveraging each other’s expertise, data, and technology.
Travel entrepreneurship through Bridge Labs
Startups aren’t just about causing disruption; they solve it too. Even this year, we’ve met over 80 new startups through our Bridge Labs program alone.
In the program, these entrepreneurs work with ATPCO experts to ensure what they are developing is accurately reflecting the airline’s pricing intent and are looking to leverage ATPCO pricing and retailing content delivered through ATPCO APIs. Despite the market volatility, some of those groundbreaking startups were able to progress with their solution, and here’s two highlights.
Fetcherr, much like PROS, is working to improve the airline revenue management process. Fetcherr is using DPNN technology (deep price neural network) that collates and combines enormous amounts of data points from all verticals of industry, including supply pricing, demand curves, competitor price analysis, and even the weather. It then uses a sophisticated AI algorithm, very similar to those used in financial markets, to help airlines to predict the optimal price for any product at any point and time in the future.
Another interesting example that supports our strategy to get data in all channels is mTrip. Leveraging the success of its commercial travel apps on iOS and Android with over 3 million downloads, mTrip has developed mobile solutions for the various segments of the travel industry including tour operators, travel agencies, travel management companies, and cruise distributors. Working with mTrip is helping us to better understand the mobile channel needs of the future.
New solutions are my silver lining
Helping the industry with global recovery is going to take all of us, and I’m excited to work with our partners on projects like these. If you want to learn more about ATPCO’s Price Elements or our Bridge Labs program, explore our website or reach out at hello@atpco.net.
Learn why airline fare rules categories are a crucial part of the industry’s data, how they help maintain structure through databases, and what each category entails.
Using modern data to tackle old and new challenges
About Tom Gregorson
For over 25 years, Tom has been working to develop products that enhance the travel industry.
Throughout his career, he has gained insight and provided leadership through his various roles at airlines and global distribution systems, and with ATPCO since 1996.
In his current role, Tom leads the Strategy organization and is responsible for creating the long-term vision for ATPCO and exploring new business ventures. His focus is on standards and effective ecosystem governance, incubation of new concepts like dynamic pricing and tax automation, as well as overseeing R&D and Bridge Labs.
Tom has built a reputation for being a thought leader and implementer of industry solutions in the distribution space.