How Airlines Can Eliminate Duplicate Group Booking Requests

How Airlines Can Eliminate Duplicate Group Booking Requests

As the pandemic’s influence on the airline industry fades in the background, a new situation has emerged.

With skyrocketing demand for flight tickets, airlines increasingly must deal with the scourge of duplicate bookings from travel agents, retail customers, and corporates.

Given that airlines lose an estimated 3% of group revenue from these duplicate bookings, they need to be aware of the following:

  • What constitutes a duplicate booking
  • How does a duplicate booking happen
  • What are the problems associated with duplicate bookings
  • How to tackle the issue without upsetting travel agents, retail, and corporate customers who are just looking for a bargain

What are duplicate bookings?

Everyone, including travel agencies, corporates, and groups of tourists, is looking for the cheapest possible fare. Nowadays, people who understand how airline pricing works have a trick up their sleeves, costing airlines millions of dollars in group booking revenue. Given that airline fares vary depending on the market demand, time of booking, and other factors, travel agencies, retail customers, and corporates look to game the system by making multiple reservations for the same itinerary. They hope that they will get an acceptable quote if they make enough bookings.

When the same person/ group ends up holding 2 or more confirmed reservations for the same itinerary, the airlines end up with multiple blocked but unpaid seats, a nightmare for revenue managers.

In several instances, the airline’s passenger service system (PSS) may notice the discrepancy and cancel the latest booking. However, this isn’t always the case, given that similar bookings could be made from different names or via different channels.

How airlines can detect duplicate group bookings in real-time and cancel them

Given the sheer volume of bookings made, airlines have an uphill task combating the issue of duplicate group bookings.

Attempting to manually verify each group booking can be incredibly taxing, not to mention highly ineffective. Many airlines now have an email that customers can reach out to when they make a duplicate booking.

But what if the travel agency or retail customer made the booking on purpose?

Even if customers voluntarily reach out, airlines’ group desks must comb through countless emails to identify and cancel duplicate reservations. Making matters worse, the airline now must find new passengers for the vacant seats.

This is where an automated group booking solution like GroupRM comes in.

It is worth mentioning that such a solution can weed out duplicate group booking requests by automatically checking all the bookings for similar email ids, origin and destination, number of passengers, travel date, date of raising requests, etc.

If a duplicate booking is suspected, it is flagged so that the group desk can verify if there is any discrepancy before canceling the extra reservation. Once duplicate group bookings have been identified, airlines have several options.

  • The airline can confirm the reservation that was made first.
  • Alternatively, if different travel agencies have booked seats for the same group of passengers, the airline can accept the booking from the travel agency that has the best relationship with them. This could mean that the selected travel agency has brought in the most revenue for the airline, they have been loyal to the airline for many years, or that they are willing to pay higher fares for priority when it comes to bookings.
  • There is also the possibility of allowing the travel agency or retail travelers to get the booking based on who accepts the quote from the airline first.

When airlines can identify duplicate group requests automatically, they can get a better grip on which routes and markets are most likely to be plagued with this issue.

Moreover, if the airline finds that a travel agency is repeatedly engaging in raising duplicate requests, they can restrict the agent’s access to their inventory. Case in point, a South Africa-based airline that used GroupRM safeguarded over 8000 seats annually from travel agents engaged in practices such as raising duplicate reservations.

Another great benefit is that airlines can maintain a high level of customer satisfaction by accurately identifying duplicate group booking requests. Doing the process manually can lead to genuine group customers getting snubbed, as airline group desk employees may mistakenly cancel group bookings from people with similar names, thinking it was a duplicate request.

Conclusion

Duplicate requests from group customers and travel agents are a significant pain point for airlines, especially when bookings are at an all-time high. Spending even a few hours manually dealing with duplicate requests can drain resources for the group desk, revenue management, or sales team. Instead, airlines can switch to an automated solution like GroupRM that can identify duplicate bookings with high accuracy by analyzing multiple factors in seconds.

Reach out to our team to see GroupRM in action.

How GroupRM Can Help Airlines Modernize Their Group Booking Process

How GroupRM Can Help Airlines Modernize Their Group Booking Process 

In recent years, airlines have increasingly embraced customer-centricity with dynamic and personalized offers. 

However, airlines are struggling to transition to the modern retailing landscape, especially with group bookings, due to an overreliance on legacy systems. 

Legacy Group Bookings— Airlines’ One-Way Ticket to Revenue Leakage and Poor Customer Experience

Typically, group bookings are made by customers over weeks with Google Forms, lengthy email exchanges with the sales/ revenue management teams, or phone calls to call centers. 

With airlines desperate to find new avenues of growth and revenue, legacy group booking methods are casting a cloud over the industry’s future.

Traditional ways of acquiring and servicing group passengers come with the following drawbacks:

  • Processing a group request over call or email takes weeks.
  • Reliance on distribution channels and travel agents with high commissions leads to lower revenue for the airline despite sky-high ticket prices.
  • Airlines cannot personalize offers or provide dynamic quotes 
  • Customers can’t purchase ancillaries because legacy distribution systems only allow airlines to display airfare and schedules. 
  • Airlines can’t offer customized terms and conditions based on the customer segment.
  • Manual ticketing makes payment collection, PNR updating, name updating, etc., a nightmare.
  • Post-ticketing services, such as canceling and modifying tickets, are time-consuming.

How GroupRM helps you navigate these challenges

GroupRM is an AI-powered solution for airlines to manage group bookings seamlessly, offer a differentiated “experience” rather than just selling flight tickets, bring down distribution costs, and increase revenue with dynamic pricing.

GroupRM capabilities

Offer Management

GroupRM allows you to identify the customer with their buying habits. Having identified the customer, you can offer a group quote with dynamic pricing instantly based on their purchase history, competitor rates, load factor, pre-set policy, etc.

This reduction in the turnaround time for delivering group quotes is especially valuable, given that 3 out of 4 group customers accept the first quote they receive. 

Importantly, you can offer personalized ancillaries to the customer, delivering a “shopping experience” guaranteed to significantly increase their satisfaction with the booking experience. 

Automating the offer management process with instant, optimally priced group quotes and ancillaries will save the revenue manager’s time, boost the materialization rates, and ultimately increase the airline’s revenue.

Order Management

The group customers benefit from an easy-to-use web portal where they can book, modify, or cancel their tickets.

Customers have the luxury of negotiating group fares in the same portal. Once the airline provides them with an acceptable quote, the customers can accept the fare quickly, make payments, get their PNR and tickets issued, and update their names.  It is also worth mentioning that the customers can request modifications to the ticket, including upsizing, downsizing, and changes to the itinerary.

Group policy enforcement

Airlines can set up customized markups and commissions for travel agencies and corporate clients, boosting revenue. Airlines can also configure specific cancellation and booking policies for each type of group based on the country or region, the date of departure, etc. 

Importantly, after a booking is made, and the group customer or travel agent has made the partial payment, the solution can send payment reminders, reminders to update the passenger’s name and other details, etc. This ensures that the sales or revenue management team doesn’t constantly follow up with the customers for these trivial issues. 

Passengers often get quotes from multiple travel agents, so airlines provide different quotes to the same customer via different travel agencies. The group policy enforcement capabilities of GroupRM can play a crucial role in weeding out these duplicate requests coming from travel agencies.

Automating series bookings

Series bookings are group bookings pre-purchased by a travel agent regularly on the same flight. For instance, travel agents can tell the airline they want 20 seats on a flight from London to Madrid every Saturday for the football season. This type of booking is done when the travel agent or tour operator knows there will be predictable demand for a particular period, and they don’t want to make group bookings repeatedly. Tour operators who handle large volumes of pilgrims or travel managers making a reservation for a work conference can also make use of this functionality.

In all these instances, the travel agents can self-book series inventory. Instead of making multiple group bookings, which is a hassle when managing groups with multiple departure spots, the travel agent can raise a single request with all his requirements met. The agent can customize details including the number of seats, origin and destination, and the expected fare, and raise the request. The airline revenue management team can quickly evaluate the request to accept or deny it fully or partially. The airline can even negotiate the rates for the entire booking or various groups with the travel agent.

Based on the relationship with the travel agent, the airline can even offer special prices that incentivize further booking.  Through these series bookings, the airline can ensure that the flight is reasonably filled well in advance and that they get substantial money to fund their operations beforehand. 

This automation in raising series requests saves everyone involved a lot of time because previously travel agents had to call or email the airline help desk or a call center and make all the bookings manually.

Conclusion 

Depending on legacy processes for pricing, offer creation, and group booking processing is a massive drain on your resources, and it is also guaranteed to leave your passengers dissatisfied. The distribution cost is also exorbitant, given how much legacy reservation systems and travel agencies charge. 

As an alternative, you can embrace group booking automation, offer, and order management software, GroupRM, which has helped many of our clients get up to a 28% rise in group revenue.

The software helps airlines provide group customers with a personalized, cost-effective, and memorable flying experience. It further empowers airlines to offer their travel agency customers special fares and an effortless series booking experience. Schedule a demo to speak with our experts to see how GroupRM can help your airline. 

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Reinventing Series Booking For Airlines Through Automation

For airlines looking to increase operating revenue and get consistent business, series bookings from travel agents have emerged as a source of delight.

Now, what are series bookings?

Essentially, if a travel agent or tour operator wants 20 tickets from London to Spain every Saturday for the entirety of the football season, it is considered a series booking.

With series bookings, travel agents no longer have to go through the hassle of making multiple group bookings every time they want to fly their customers to a particular location in a recurring fashion, say every weekend.

At this juncture, when airlines have begun prioritizing the generation of consistent revenue to operate their flights, automating, and making the series booking process seamless can be a gamechanger.

The pains of navigating a flawed series booking process

Before the series booking is finalized, the travel agent would have spent hours or even days on email threads or the phone, explaining the requirement to the group desk. Usually, the travel agent must fill out countless passenger details in the outdated reservation systems of airlines or work on time-consuming spreadsheets to be emailed to the airline sales team.

In both these cases, the airline must spend tons of hours calculating the fare with all the relevant factors in consideration in a highly error-prone process.

The travel agents must then wait for days to get status updates on each group booking within the series booking request. Subsequently, the travel agent must go through each of the group fares and reach out to the group desk team of the airline to painstakingly negotiate all aspects of the series booking quote.

 Often, by the time the negotiations for each ticket are through, the flight fare would’ve already changed.

There is also no mechanism for the travel agent to partially accept, reject, or negotiate the fares.

 Since groups are complex and unpredictable, they require constant changes in terms of schedule, number of people, etc., which is another painful process for the travel agents and the airline.

Automating series booking—a win-win for airlines and travel agents

The process of series booking needs to be streamlined every step of the way.

 Airlines can provide travel agents with a dedicated booking portal to raise series requests with a few clicks using an automation solution.

 They can enter the number of seats they want, the origin & destination, and the price they are willing to pay for the seats. Then, the system automatically comes up with a fare that the travel agent can accept or reject.

 Crucially, the travel agent can even accept parts of the series booking quote and negotiate the rest of the groups’ fares with the airline based on their budget or the ability to get a better deal elsewhere.

 It is worth mentioning that travel agents can make whatever changes they want to the bookings with just a few clicks. Additionally, the travel agent can make the payment right away or pay a small upfront amount.

Either way, the airline gets a significant amount of money that it can use for its operations, along with the guarantee that the flights will be reasonably filled. 

 A great advantage for airlines is that since the quote is generated automatically and instantaneously as the travel agent enters their requirements, there is no room for error.

 Most importantly, if airlines see that the travel agent has declined their quote, they can have their revenue management team reach out manually and provide a fare that will help retain the travel agent’s business. This means that the group desk can focus exclusively on such high-yielding tasks rather than unproductive manual labor, such as following up on emails.

 Moreover, airlines can keep close track of the request history of various travel agents to provide customized promotions that fit the goals of both the sales and revenue management teams.

Conclusion

Automating series booking will pay off in both the short and long term because it saves time and resources for all the stakeholders. In the short term, it provides operating revenue for the airline, and over the long term, they don’t have to face an increase in manual labor for processing series bookings when the number of fleets increases.

GroupRM has played a vital role in many airlines’ efforts to bring in consistent revenue and contribute to their flights having a load factor that makes the trip worthwhile by making series booking a seamless and error-free process. As a result, numerous airlines, especially in the Asian markets, have brought down the average turnaround time per series booking using our solution. 

To know more, Reach us for a demo or book a demo with the sales team at https://www.grouprm.net/

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3 Tips For Exceptional Group Sales Experience That Retains More Passengers

Airlines have their work cut out as people worldwide make frenzied travel plans to shake off the misery of the pandemic-induced lockdowns. To benefit from the burgeoning demand for group travel, airlines need to digitize and make the entire process of group booking and pricing pain-free. 

This means that the days of customers emailing the sales team, waiting for days on end for a quote as the sales and revenue management team tussle over optimal pricing, and finally getting an unsatisfactory deal need to be over if airlines ever hope to recover from the pandemic. 

Here, we explore how airlines can start treating group sales as a mission-critical aspect of their operations and provide a booking experience that leads to higher revenue and passenger retention. 

Invest in an intelligent group revenue management solution

Over 60% of group booking business goes to airlines that send the quickest quote. With manual group sales processes, airlines usually spend 5-6 days coming up with a quote that is satisfactory for both the sales and revenue management team. 

Consequently, airlines need an end to end, automated booking solution that can generate instant quotes (based on passenger willingness to pay, market demand & competitor pricing) and contracts while also ensuring airline policy compliance in group bookings across all users, including internal sales team, revenue managers, and travel agents. 

Further, look for a solution to automate bookings, approval, and even the ticketing process for group travel requests across every sales channel. 

Notably, the solution should allow bookings and contracts to be managed in one place to facilitate changes to Passenger Name Records (PNRs). 

Ensure a frictionless user experience

Travel agents and other users who depend on your booking solution need to have a seamless experience with it. Airlines can achieve this using a digital booking solution that eliminates the need for manual review of group bookings, delivers real-time alerts related to the booking, automates contract generation, enables easy payment tracking, and allows users to book tickets based on group/ trip type. Real-time, data-driven recommendations to users is another way to enhance their experience and boost revenue through the sale of ancillaries. 

Prioritize relationships

Ensure that your group sales management solution allows you to effectively manage the relationships between stakeholders, such as travel agents, internal sales teams, and revenue managers. 

Crucially, the solution should allow travel agency level rules to be set up and managed, facilitating trust between sales and revenue teams by ensuring that the group pricing aligns with their goals.

Moreover, airlines can foster transparency between revenue management and sales with a solution that allows both teams to manage group pricing and policies from the same location. 

Apart from this, airlines should use a tool that provides real-time price comparisons so that customers don’t cancel contracts. Leveraging a tool that can track metrics, such as individual customers’ conversion and materialization rate, will also go a long way in facilitating a better relationship between the airline and its group passengers. 

Conclusion 

Group sales account for 5-10% of airline revenue, and in some regions, it is even more than that. Given that corporate travel and tourism is making a comeback with relaxed covid restrictions worldwide, it is time for airlines to invest in an intelligent booking and pricing solution that takes away the pain of group bookings. 

The need of the hour is GroupRM. Its automated itinerary building & relationship-building capabilities, intuitive user interface, and intelligent pricing will keep you ahead of the competition. 

Reach us for a demo / consultation. 

Airline Plan with Three Layers at the Back - Blog Banner - Relevance Of O&D Bid Price-Based Revenue Management In Post-Covid Era

Relevance Of O&D Bid Price-Based Revenue Management In Post Covid Era

It is no secret that before the pandemic, the airline sector was booming. Companies were constantly expanding their travel budgets, and airlines took full advantage of executives with deep pockets to turn in consistent profits. Further, tourists thronged various hot destinations around the world. In 2019 alone, some 1.5 billion tourist arrivals were recorded internationally, and this effectively meant that international tourism growth outpaced the global economy.

A huge driver of these profits was the fact that airlines had become masters at leveraging historical data to forecast demand to determine seat availability and price in a way that delivered optimal profits. 

But this all changed in the early months of 2020 when the covid pandemic prompted governments to shut their borders and set up numerous travel restrictions that brought the travel industry to a screeching halt. 

The non-viability of O&D bid price-based revenue management

As the pandemic took hold of the world, airlines found, to their dismay, that the O&D systems that had set them back by anywhere between $100,000 to $10, 000, 000, had ceased to be useful.

Border shutdowns, lockdowns, and curfews across the world were forcing passengers to take direct flights rather than connecting ones, meaning there was no fixed demand that the network airlines could take advantage of to set optimal prices for their inventory.

Consequently, airlines are losing their pricing power without their ability to accurately gauge passenger’s price sensitivity and willingness to pay.

Keeping up with the times

Given the volatile scenario of the aviation industry, airlines need to shift to revenue management systems that are flexible and offer the ability to make rapid decisions. The need of the hour is to find a cost-effective solution for optimizing flight routes based on demand and optimizing the pricing strategy based on traveler sentiment and paying capacity. 

It is however worth noting that to maximize revenue, focusing on retail customers and tourists is key. This is because many studies indicate that business travel will take longer to recover. Some estimates say 36 % of business travel may be permanently lost, largely due to arrangements, such as remote work. However, airlines need to make sure that they have enough seats set aside for business travelers on future flights when demand for corporate travel rises.

In the meantime, ancillaries are a great way to boost revenue. Specifically, providing ancillaries that people care about now, such as travel insurance, PCR tests, vaccinations on arrival, etc. will go a long way in filling flights with high-yield passengers. 

Bottom-line 

The promise of O&D bid price-based revenue management—boosting seat availability for high revenue connecting passengers while simultaneously preventing connecting passengers from displacing local passengers with higher yields—is unattainable, at least for the moment when historical data is unreliable. As a result, airlines need to look for simpler forecasting methods that do not eat away revenue the way O&D bid price-based revenue management systems do.  

Emphasis on retail passengers and tourists, and bringing in more ancillary revenue, must also be part of the solution to turn profitable on emerging from the pandemic.  

If you are looking for such cost-effective solutions that are guaranteed to bring your airline back on track, reach us at marketing@infinitisoftware.net 

Automated-solution-helps

automated Solution Helps Airlines Manage Group Bookings Profitably

Today’s tech-savvy passengers would like to search and book their flight tickets from the airline websites or other online portals. The process of online booking is very easy, less time consuming and provide ample options to passengers for searching flights, feeding their details and making payments to book their flights. But the scenario is entirely different in group bookings for more than nine customers.

As usual the group passengers expect for a negotiation in the fare and prompt responses from an airline when they approach that airline for group booking. And, this the most challenging task for the airline to handle.

Most of the airlines follow the manual process of handling the group traffic due to the non-availability of proper web base automated solution for group bookings. The airline group desk need to consider lots of factors to evaluate and quote the group booking fare, which demands a lot of time and resources. After determining the fare also the airline group desk need to contact the passengers through phone, emails or travel agents for the final negotiation and booking. That makes group booking a lengthy, time consuming and complicated process.

By the time customers may get the lesser quotation from the other competing airlines. And if the consumers choose to fly with any of the competing airlines then the first airline in the process of negotiation lose the potential revenue and passengers. The whole hard work and process followed by the group desk of the airline up to that time turns into a complete waste.

But now this problem can be eliminated by the airlines, by adopting Group Revenue Management Solution. It brings a high level of automation in the airlines’ existing group revenue management system enabling airline group analysts to better manage the group traffic and optimize group sales.

Automated group Revenue management solution enables the customers to directly request for the fare with which they want to book the airline tickets for the group of more than nine passengers, from the airline website itself. Simultaneously, it helps the airline group desk to monitor incoming group request, evaluate them and determine the appropriate fare by processing the request in multilevel automated matrix system and respond back to the customer within very less time period. Other SSR services can also be managed through the automated solution that does nothing but maximizes the revenue of the airline.

Thus, it results in reducing the risk of other airlines approaching the customers and vice-verse for group booking. Moreover, as per the general trend customers become happy with the prompt responses and like to do repeat bookings with the airline in the future.

Overall, integration of automated revenue management solution with the existing revenue management process of airline makes the group booking a happy and error free process for the customers and revenue generator for the airline.

Maximize-airline-revenue

Maximize airline revenue by implementing Dynamic Pricing for group booking

Be a business travel or tour, group traveling is always an exciting one. The exhilaration would be much better if the fare and process of group booking are made seamless and faster. As group travel is becoming increasingly popular, airlines should gear up their group booking procedures to serve customers efficiently. Airlines do not require a mere group booking solution but a group booking revenue management system. The advantage of group booking revenue management system lies in providing the right fare to the right group at the right time. The appropriate blend of these three elements is the powerhouse of revenue to the airlines.

Right Fare to the Right Group

On an average, medium sized airline group desk receives around 150 to 200 group request during low demand season and it ranges up to 500 during peak season. Though airline sets the turn around time to be few hours, it takes around two days to process each request. Here, identification of the right fare to be quoted to the right group becomes a mandate that would yield better revenue to the airlines. Depending on various factors such as availability, current load factor, size of the group, requested fare, nature of trip and demand the best fare should be quoted. But the changing nature of all the above mentioned factors makes it difficult for the airlines in decision making to groups. For which a dynamic pricing strategy, speedy processing and altogether an automation is vital.

Right Fare at the Right Time

A dynamic pricing strategy must be applicable to multiple scenarios on the basis of market condition. The challenge of the airlines lie on deciding the fare to be quoted for each group travel request. The travelers now are more keen to negotiate on their group booking and be assured of receiving the best deals. Airlines have to monitor the competitors price as well as evaluate the customer’s history to quote a price. Conjointly, there also exists special scenarios where airlines decide on promotional fares and surge fares varying from sectors and season. Since the customers are provided with huge choice and the probability of switching is also too high, group fare negotiations help airlines to retain the customers. It requires a timely decision with a right fare in order to maximize revenue from each group request.

Right Group at the Right Time

While hundreds of group requests are being showered on the group desk analysts, it consumes huge manpower and time to process them. Prioritisation of the group becomes almost impossible as the processing of group requests begins as in the request arrives. The challenge lies in choosing which group request to be processed first with the appropriate fare. Priority of serving group requests includes not only the volume of passengers traveling but also the revenue and prior client relationship of the airlines. An opportune fare on time and automation in work process are the key to retain internal and external customers.

Considering all the above scenarios, a customer sending group request to two different airlines, one with a manual processing and another with an automated group booking tool. Imagine, it takes one days to obtain a reply from manual processing while it takes an hour from an automated group booking solution. That’s where the power of automation lies. !! While myriad obstacles are being put forth to an airline front. If there could be any one stop solution to all the problems being posed, then bringing an automation to the process becomes the answer.