SINGAPORE Airlines has signed up for the full suite of Amadeus Revenue Management solutions, under a new agreement which will see it adopt the Altéa Network Revenue Management, Amadeus Dynamic Pricing and Amadeus Altéa Group Manager systems. The deal will see SQ move to a “customercentric” revenue management strategy addressing the new ways travellers shop and air products are sold, and is an extension of the airline’s long-running relationship with Amadeus which already provides its Altéa solution to power SIA’s reservations systems.
Amadeus Asia Pacific executive vice president airline commercial, Hazem Hussein, said the Altéa Network Revenue Management Suite was different to traditional systems because it “takes into account the bigger picture of airline profitability, rather than just the point-to-point price of a seat. Benefiting from the unique deep integration with the carrier’s Altéa system it hooks into a gold mine of information and provides a clear competitive advantage around new merchandising practices such as dynamic pricing, fare families and ancillary sales”.
Hussein said the Altéa revenue management suite understands traveller behaviour and specifically addresses one of the biggest lost revenue opportunities for airlines today: the ‘buy-down effect’, a phenomenon resulting from the introduction of more flexible fare structures that “ultimately shifts bookings in high profit classes to lower yield classes”.
The Dynamic Pricing solution is also claimed to help airlines boost their bottom line, defining the “optimal strategy to maximise revenue across the life of a flight”. Based on real-time shopping session information (trip context), market information (competitor offers) and the airline’s pricing strategy, it models customer behaviour and willingness to pay, instantly calculating and offering the optimum price. And with group travel bookings on the rise, Amadeus Altéa Group Manager helps airlines better manage group requests from quotation to contract, allowing them to boost revenue from group business, Hussein said.
The Amadeus Network Revenue Management system can only be offered to carriers which use Altéa for their reservations. “This is because the solution has such a dependency on getting the best customer insight from the airline’s primary passenger service system, and only Altéa can provide this level of information,” he added.
The next step for Amadeus is to work closely with Singapore Airlines to ensure the implementation is completed as seamlessly as possible. Other carriers already using the Amadeus network revenue management solution include Scandinavian Airlines and Eva Airways, with Hussein saying he’s “confident that more airlines will see the benefits of our next generation revenue management offering”.
