Air Availability In Sabre

History of Inventory / Availability Solutions

AVS and NAVS• Can be reliable if

frequently updated

• Easy

implementation

• Unable to account

for connecting logic

or POS logic

• Miss out on last

seat sells

• Difficult to correct

Direct Connect Availability• Increases last seat sells

• Fully supports POS,

connection logic

• Can be sent with

journey data

• Limited cascading

possibilities

• High messages volumes

Direct Access Availability• Accurate inventory on

a single airline

• Can support POS

and O&D logic

• Terminal emulation

parsing

• Agency usage varies

Teletype Terminal Emulation EDIFACT

4

Shopping Product Growth

• Low fare search request have options up to 200 itinerary choices

• Alternate City Shopping

– Mileage radius within 100 miles of the preferred origin or destination

• Calendar Shopping

– Search alternate dates +/-1 or +/-3

• Growth in all points of sale – on-line travel agencies, brick & mortar, and corporate

Solutions to Manage Polling Volumes

• Industry standard selective polling

• Local Supplier Rules

• Utilize an availability manager

– Reduced benefits associated

with real time availability

• Local business rules

– Reduce inventory system hits

for poor Look-to-Book

channels

• Industry standard selective polling

• Use AVS in low fare shopping tools

– Back to the issues with AVS

• Caching availability responses

– Pro-active charging

– ‘Pollution’ risk

• Availability Proxy

Airlines and Host Reservation Systems

GDS and On-line Travel Agencies

Sample flow in the Internet Booking Engine

JR/ WPNI CPA

Shopping

Schedules

combine

Price lookup

present

Public Negotiated

Schedules

Availability Availability

Shopping

Pricing

Availability

In low fare

searches (LFS)

we use cached

Availability

In City Pair

Availability

(CPA) we use

DCA

REQUEST

DFW->KRK

DFW-FRA X1

FRA-KRK X2

DFW->KRK

DFW-ORD X3

ORD-LHR X4

LHR-KRK X5

Agent info

Business function

Transaction processing

Availability Processing Logic

CACHE

PROXY

NAVS

DCA NAVS

CACHE DCA NAVS

CACHE DCA NAVS

AVS

Cache Tweaking

• Major factors in decision making:

– Carrier connectivity level

– Travel agency

– Shopping product

– UC rates

– Advanced purchase

• Areas to adjust availability settings:

– Cache item expiration time

– Scoring

– Cache write disabled

Availability Revenue Yield Impact

Revenue Impact: Case Study One

• Case Study One, On-line Agency Sales: Airline participating in DCS and Direct Access adds NAVS and DCA

Almost doubles YOY

sales with

upgrade

Revenue Impact: Case Study One

• Case Study One, Corporate Sales: Airline participating in DCS and Direct Access adds NAVS and DCA

Airline goes from

underperforming relative to peers to outperforming

peers in the highest yielding

market segment

Revenue Impact Case Study Two

• Case study Two: Airline moved from selective polling to 100% polling at the end of Month 3

16% increase in home

region share

11% increase in long haul

share

Revenue Impact Case Study Three

63% improvement

in sales

performance

• Case study Three: Airline removes selective polling

Revenue Impact Case Study Four

• Case study Four: Impact on sales of a selective polling policy by advance purchase period

54% decrease in

sales

500% increase in

failed sales

Market ShareMarket ShareMarket ShareMarket Share

Sabre Solution Summary

• Trouble shooting customer reported issues

• Sabre Sonic Inventory

– New inventory hosting solutions to support increased volumes at lower costs

• Better management of Sabre availability cache charging and customization

– Including proactive polling for top markets

– Indicator in the DCA message to show if a true inventory response

• Move from ‘polling’ solutions to ‘push’ solutions

– Availability Proxy

• With intelligence to apply O&D management, POS controls, and other

business rules

– Availability Push

• Airline sends unsolicited DCA messages for the purpose of charging

the cache and improving accuracy

UC troubleshooting – Customer issue reporting

Real time email examples

Bulk file sent on daily basis

Customer monitoring webpages

• Online Customer Support Desk

– Initial point of contact for Online Customer

– Issues reporting and registering

– Preliminary root cause detection with

dedicated tools for UC troubleshooting for

different:

• Source of availability (AVS, DCA,

Cache/Proxy, hosted carriers)

• Products used (shopping services (JR),

CPA)

– Patterns identification and escalation

– Issue documentation from reporting to

resolution

– Escalation to appropriate desks for further

investigations

– Connectivity issues escalation

UC troubleshooting – before contacting Airlines

Questions?