GroupRM – Streamlining Offer And Order Management For Airline Group Customers

GroupRM – Streamlining Offer And Order Management For Airline Group Customers

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The airline industry has long relied on Passenger Service Systems (PSS) and Global Distribution Systems (GDS) to support the group booking process. However, most airlines are still managing group bookings manually, which doesn’t satisfy the needs of today’s tech-savvy travelers. With the rise of metasearch engines, passengers will do their flight comparisons and analysis to plan their journeys.

To adapt to the changing landscape, airlines must embrace a more advanced offer and order management model to retain customers. This shift presents a remarkable opportunity to upgrade digitally and unlock substantial revenue potential.

Addressing Current Group Booking Offer Management Issues

These processes are primarily email driven. Airlines depend heavily on email responses and calls, leading to inconsistencies in data tracking and potential miscommunications. It is time-consuming for both the airline group booking team and group passengers and it also leads to many human errors. Sometimes it may end up with frustrations that customers reflect from delayed processes.

Since there is no access to real-time data airline executives cannot make guaranteed decisions from their reports. Some of the limitations are,

  1. Less visibility on group passengers’ history and preferences
  2. Restricted ability to provide a shopping experience for different travel products
  3. Inability to offer personalized products or sell new travel products
  4. Difficulty in applying complex group policies

The manual nature of these operations means that the airline team’s primary goal is to sell group booking seats. Selling personalized travel ancillaries becomes their secondary priority and proves to be a challenging task. This is a serious missed revenue opportunity for airlines to let it slip away. If they have to do it, they need to compile it from multiple sources and complex distribution systems to understand customer behavior, which consumes a lot of time and has constraints.

How GroupRM Revolutionizes Offer Management

Booking Engine

This is a single integrated platform where the airline team will be provided with a self-sufficient web portal to upload, create and manage group booking requests. It will also provide analytics to strategize and offer personalized travel products. Airlines will benefit from it since it seamlessly integrates revenue management and other distribution platforms to get real-time data. 

Hyper-Personalization

Group revenue managers and group sales desks can manage and offer hyper-personalized products to the targeted customers. The offers can be easily pushed out to both air and non-air contents. It is a win-win for both serving a wide variety of customer needs. 

Intelligent Pricing

All the data is synchronized and used for future purposes where the airline teams no longer have to go back and forth on the group quote. GroupRM will automatically generate group quotes using the available data and real-time evaluation. It doesn’t only create a group quote but dives within to even create a bundled offer that’s perfect for travel ancillaries. 

Compared to the legacy type, this automated solution will help provide higher margin content that helps reach airline revenue goals. With GroupRM, airline executives will now be able to do the following 4 tasks effectively. 

Identify customer – Customized portal to segregate different user categories and get the reportsPresent – Analyze the customer’s behaviors and preferences and create the right product.
Shop – Target personalized offerings based on current inventory, historical performance, and future forecastPricing – Use historical behavior and the current trend to forecast group materialization

Addressing Current Group Booking – Order Management Issues

It is primarily based on the reservation system. The entire ticketing process, from group requests to confirmation, will be tedious and time-consuming for airline executives. The order processing is likely to be slow, and group passengers will face the following constraints:

  1. Communication is limited to email and phone for bookings
  2. Limited awareness of new travel products 
  3. Extended waiting and processing times for group bookings 

How GroupRM Revolutionizes Order Management

GroupRM provides several features that allow airlines to streamline group bookings with real-time information, quote generation, booking confirmation, payment processing, and reporting. This strengthens the airline’s ability to effectively manage orders. 

Business Intelligence

GroupRM utilizes an advanced set of data analytics that give a deep understanding of customer behavior, market trends, and historical booking data. This gives airlines a deeper understanding of their target audience and makes informed decisions.

Customer Segmentation

With GroupRM’s business intelligence tools, airlines can categorize factors such as travel preferences, demographics, loyalty status, and purchasing patterns. This segmentation enables airlines to tailor their offers and promotions to specific customer segments, enhancing personalization and customer satisfaction.

Comprehensive automation

This is one of the cores of GroupRM’s capabilities. It gives a complete automation package for online order fulfillment, handling payments, post-booking modifications, and ticketing that gives 10x process fulfillment.

Smart shopping

This is a user-first interface where the customer will be provided with an intuitive web portal to prioritize the shopping experience for their travel products. The upside for airlines is the ability to understand customer behavior and upsell travel products. 

About GroupRM

GroupRM has proven to be a game-changer for over 25 airlines, providing airline revenue managers, group sales desks, and administrators with seamless tracking and oversight of all group booking operations. The results were proven to get up to 28% revenue gain from full-service and low-cost carriers yielding remarkable outcomes. Within weeks of implementation, the solution will itself recover its investment by delighting the group passengers worldwide.

Schedule a demo or contact us now to take the first step towards transforming your airline’s group booking success with GroupRM.

How Can Airlines Eliminate 90 Of Group Booking Revenue Fraud With An Automated Solution

How Can Airlines Eliminate 90% Of Group Booking Revenue Fraud With An Automated Solution?

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Airlines worldwide have faced numerous data breaches, compromises, and loopholes resulting from outdated management systems and technical issues.

According to IATA, airline fraud costs approximately $858 million per year. Security threats come in various forms, including employee fraud, phishing schemes, fake customer accounts, fraudulent travel agencies, and triangulation schemes. 

Ticket booking fraud directly impacts revenue and exposes vulnerabilities. Fraudulent activities in group bookings can cost airlines millions of dollars, which becomes unsustainable over time.

Let’s see the common types of revenue fraud in group bookings

1. Employee Fraud

Airline employees who know the loopholes of the system will exploit the bookings for their personal benefits. The employees may book group tickets for their friends or family members at the expense of the airlines leaving no trace. 

2. Fake Travel Agencies

When a traveler requests a group quote, the unregistered travel agencies may book/cancel the flights, release fabricated stories, and have fake credit cards/ bank accounts. They impersonate the original and tie up with different travel agencies fetching their user accounts leading to personal information misuse.

3. Dark Web

This type of fraud is non-traceable and airlines will usually have no idea how attackers gained access to this information. With both ad hoc and group bookings done online, data leaks and misuse are susceptible to fraud and attacks. Airlines will mostly be in the dark on how long and what types of information they got access to.

4. Stolen Loyalty Miles

Fraudsters steal unused loyalty points/miles from business travelers or affluent individuals and utilize them for their own benefit. Group bookings, which involve higher costs and consequently higher earned loyalty miles, result in substantial revenue loss for airlines.

Recommended steps to be taken by airlines to secure their revenue for group bookings

1. Integrating a booking system

A single-platform integrated booking system is so much easier as every group booking activity can be tracked and monitored. It is an end-to-end centralized system where group bookings are handled from start to end. An airline revenue management system also reports and detects any suspicious activities. Moreover, the airline staff has complete authorization control to stop or process any steps. 

2. Implementing group policies

Group policies act as an extra layer of protection against any unfavorable activities to the airlines. Manual tracking of group policies is extremely difficult and vulnerable to many data points. A group policy engine will allow you to configure diverse group policies such as regional, request types, air routes, seasonal policies, profile types, etc., resulting in 100% compliance. 

3. Multi-level authentication

All the vulnerable points of the airline can be added to a multi-layer authentication or 2-step verification at certain points to prevent unauthorized usage. The airline can maintain the session limitation to terminate inactive sessions when not in use. The airline staff can fortify their security measures and block all the compromised emails while they can launch a full-scale investigation to ensure the safety of passengers and customers. 

It is easier with the airline revenue management system to initiate remedial measures. 

These three steps have the potential to prevent 90% of revenue fraud in airline group bookings, assuming a robust system is in place. 

Conclusion

News of revenue fraud and system vulnerabilities spreads rapidly. Our airline revenue management solution, GroupRM, has been developed by travel tech experts at Infiniti Software Solutions, who have taken various security scenarios into account, including fake payment information, fraudulent travel agencies, scams, loyalty fraud, and safeguarding against 90% of revenue frauds.

Talk to our experts to know how GroupRM will protect the system – Schedule a demo.

Offer And Order Management Challenges Holding Back Airlines’ Group Booking Revenue

Offer And Order Management Challenges Holding Back Airlines’ Group Booking Revenue

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Given how the airline industry must contend with heavy regulation, wildly fluctuating fuel prices, and many more challenges that threaten it daily, they have strived to become masters at revenue maximization.

Everything from a bottle of water to a few extra inches of legroom on a flight has become subject to careful consideration when it comes to pricing. Airlines have even managed to compartmentalize the entire flight, splitting passengers into categories based on purchasing power to charge optimal rates for each person. 

Further, airlines have automated nearly everything that happens after a person makes a booking, such as payment reminders, ticket generation, requests to update the passenger’s name, etc. 

Despite all these advancements in automation and predictive technology, airlines have struggled to bring to group bookings the same convenience, personalization, and dynamic pricing that individuals get when they book a flight. As a result, airlines are losing their opportunity to increase group revenue by up to 28%. 

Why legacy offer and order creation methods aren’t doing airlines any favors

Every aspect of a group booking, including offer creation, order creation, and post-sales support, is riddled with inefficiencies that cause revenue leakage, poor help desk productivity, and a subpar customer experience. 

When a customer wants a group quote, most airlines have them send an email with their requirements. The airline cannot know how valuable the group is, so the email goes to the bottom of the pile. By the time the revenue management team, sales, or the help desk gets to it, the customer has most likely requested quotes from multiple airlines.

3 out of 4 times, the customer accepts the group quote from the airline that responds first. 

The email-driven process also means that the airline has no way of knowing the customers’ buying history, level of urgency, purchasing power, ancillary requirements, etc., which leads to a generic offer. 

Meanwhile, for the order to be created, the customer must go through the airline’s reservation system, which isn’t typically designed to handle the nuances of group bookings. The airline cannot quickly create PNRs with multiple group terms and conditions. Aside from that, the customer faces issues, such as difficulties in payment due to the size and complexity of the booking and the tiresome manual ticketing process.

Post-ticketing, the call centers that handle the customers’ calls have difficulty providing proper ancillaries or the ability to quickly modify or partially cancel the bookings, leading to poor customer experience.  

What should airlines prioritize to maximize group booking revenue?

The next decade belongs to the airlines that can reimagine the group booking process. 

Given that premium corporate customers make many group bookings, airlines that prioritize modernizing the entire process to make it more personalized and convenient can expect a huge upside. 

One of the best investments an airline can make in this regard is implementing an AI-powered group booking solution, like GroupRM, that can provide customers easy to use online interface to make their group requests with all the customizations they need. 

The platform further equips you with the ability to provide customers with special group fares, direct confirmation of bookings, purchase specialized ancillaries, and, most importantly, make, modify, or cancel bookings via self-service. 

Besides, the prices provided by the solution would be real-time fares that the customers can negotiate or accept via the same platform in a few clicks. 

An airline in Southeast Asia saw revenue from retail groups increase from zero to $1.5M in 3 months with the implementation of an online interface for their passengers to make group bookings easily.

Further, payments can be made through multiple means, such as credit card, BSP, wire transfer, cash, etc., and an EMD can be generated against the payment. Additionally, the customers can update their group passengers’ names simultaneously without the airline having to follow up to get each one. 

Due to the increased visibility and ease of booking provided by the group booking software, an Indian carrier saw its daily group requests increase from 800 to 4000 within three months.  

As this unfolds, the airline’s revenue manager can track and manage all group bookings through a unified platform. 

Through this automation of the order, offer, and post-booking management process, airlines can ensure optimal revenue, increased customer satisfaction, high efficiency by eliminating manual chores and being on top of all the relevant group booking metrics as well. 

Conclusion 

Over 20 airlines, both full-service and budget carriers, have employed GroupRM to reimagine their group booking process and consequently enjoyed stellar results. The solution paid for itself in a matter of weeks by providing a delightful booking experience to retail customers, corporates, and travel agency partners. Notably, airlines reported being able to tackle all the limitations that they had been facing with their previous group booking systems. 

If, as a revenue manager, you are interested in providing your group passengers with transparent pricing, personalized ancillaries, customizable group requests & policies based on segment, and a hassle-free experience from requesting to the time of ticket generation, reach us for a demo.

How-Automated-Group-Revenue-Management

How Automated Group Revenue Management Can Fuel Airline Recovery

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Airlines are increasingly flooded with group booking requests, and there is every reason to believe these valuable revenue-generating opportunities are squandered.

All thanks to legacy systems that include an outdated help desk and an overburdened revenue management team.

The group revenue management process is among the last areas airlines are yet to optimize by leveraging the latest technology, and the results are telling.

Travel is returning to its pre-pandemic highs, but airlines are still struggling to find a footing by differentiating themselves from their competitors with dynamic, transparent group pricing and exceptional customer experience. 

Reinventing group revenue management—the way out of the pandemic and beyond

Taking a group booking request and turning it into a source of revenue growth and customer satisfaction requires that an airline is on point with every aspect of the group booking.

Unfortunately, most airlines are in no position to pull off this feat.  

This reality warrants the reinvention of group revenue management via a next-generation tool powered by AI, GroupRM.  

Here is what GroupRM offers that will make you stand out from all your competitors and enable your airline to generate the best possible amount of revenue from group bookings.

GroupRM benefits for soaring airline revenue

Optimal prices delivered at the earliest and to the right groups

One of the biggest pain points of group booking customers, whether travel agents or retail customers, is the seemingly arbitrary pricing.  

This misunderstanding happens because the flight prices would have changed several times before the airline came up with a quote, many days after the group booking request came in.

Doing away with all this hassle for the customer and airline, GroupRM automatically generates the best possible price for the group instantaneously and sends a quote.

The customer can then negotiate for better group rates with the revenue management team, which would provide the former with a sense of control over the pricing that wouldn’t be possible if the airline came back with random prices after wasting tons of the customer’s time.

Another striking ability of GroupRM is the capacity to identify high yield groups based on historical analysis to deliver the best possible pricing

As a direct result of the automation, the airline is guaranteed better fares, higher group conversion rates, and more revenue.

Unified platform for seamless booking, negotiating, finalizing, and tracking of group requests

Retail customers, travel agents, group desk analysts, corporate travel managers, airline salesforce—wherever the group requests come from—have a single, easy-to-use interface to request a group booking.  

The booking is processed and evaluated by the airline right away, considering the historical buying behavior of the group, load factor, and competitor’s rate.

Through the same platform, customers can negotiate special rates with the airline in a transparent manner.

Supercharge helpdesk productivity

Generating quotes based on current prices, sending reminders for making payments, deciding the best pricing strategy, and checking for policy compliance in the booking are all tasks that can be automated. 

GroupRM takes care of the automation so that the revenue management team can focus on more revenue-generating tasks, such as negotiating and finalizing the best group prices.

Discover new revenue streams and optimize existing ones

Using GroupRM, airlines have the unique opportunity to run sales campaigns for high yield tickets after considering industry standards and competitor pricing.

Owing to the custom offer management capabilities that GroupRM provides, airlines can also optimize revenue by cross-selling ancillaries and providing personalized discounts.

Further, airlines can prevent revenue leakage with consistent reminders to customers for payments and for updating the name lists through the customer’s preferred channel. Notably, the GroupRM tool takes convenience to another level by allowing customers to pay in the mode of choice.

No more friction between sales and revenue management

The GroupRM team conducted a poll of airline sales and revenue professionals, and we got hard evidence for something we’d already sensed was happening; there are huge conflicts regarding group pricing.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6848907435424542720/

With software like GroupRM, there won’t be any more friction between revenue management and sales; the group policy enforcement is automatic and centralized, meaning both sales and revenue management can rest assured that their pricing policies have been met. 

Since everything is done transparently, any escalation between the customers, sales, and revenue teams can be resolved efficiently. 

Conclusion 

GroupRM has led the way, processing millions of group requests each year that make both the sales and revenue management teams of airlines happy, with fully booked flights of high yield passengers. Further, travel agents throng the airlines implementing our solution, thanks to how they can get the best group booking deals for clients at lightning speed. 

To know how your airline can join the league of high revenue growth airlines that also delight customers, reach us for a GroupRM demo/ consultation with an airline revenue maximization expert. 

Automated-solution-helps

automated Solution Helps Airlines Manage Group Bookings Profitably

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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.