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.

How Agency Wallets Can Help Airlines Handle Payments Flexibly

How Agency Wallets Can Help Airlines Handle Payments Flexibly?

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Agency wallets are a gateway to many untouched revenue opportunities for airlines. Airlines are returning to profitability in 2023, but the growth percentage is steep. According to travel experts, this market gap can be fixed by optimizing the revenue opportunities, especially with their tied-up travel agencies.

Why?

Travel agencies contribute almost 40% of the overall profit from travel agencies and 60% of the revenue from leisure and corporate travelers. Travel agencies serving different faces, cultures, and people, revenue opportunities, and payment preferences are expanded. With the world moving towards a decentralized payment system, trying to bundle it with centralized payments will result in missed revenue opportunities, especially with airlines.

An agency wallet is a flexible virtual payment option that stores and handles multi-currency payments worldwide.

What challenges are faced by travel agencies without an agency wallet?

  • They cannot initiate a single payment for ad hoc and group bookings which takes a lot of manual effort and time from the revenue team
  • Ability to handle and offer different types of customer needs namely, group travelers, corporate/business travelers, and leisure travelers
  • Providing payment flexibility in dealing with holiday management, booking prepayments, and payment installments
  • Determining the ways to expand the revenue opportunities for each customer

What challenges are faced by airlines without an agency wallet?

  • Disconnected payment environment, user journeys, and revenue systems leading to revenue loss and leakages
  • No internal flexibility to strategize and streamline the payment system for travel agencies, corporate managers, and general customers
  • Finding ways to fully utilize the back-office operations
  • Less progression, innovation, and providing various payment options

What are the benefits travel agencies will get when they use agency wallets?

Travel agencies will be most benefited from agency wallets due to the nature of their business as they are the main source of revenue for the airlines through group bookings, tourism, corporate travels, and leisure travels.

Let’s see the top 5 benefits that travel agencies get to experience when they use agency wallets,

● Multiple payments at the same time

Travel agencies cannot pay for their ad hoc and group bookings at the same time. In legacy systems, everything is handled via email, calls, and messaging with continuous follow-ups. Agency wallets have the flexible functionality to initiate many consecutive payments.

● Smooth payment modes

Wallets offer instant payments, refunds, cancellation options, coupon codes, and dynamic travel payments. Unlike bank operations which may take 3-7 business days to handle payments, agency wallets have no delays and can offer instant refunds wherever necessary.

● Integrations with multiple booking engines

Airlines will have the flexibility to connect with multiple booking engines without any hindrance in reconciling and payment issues. This will contribute a lot to the airline’s growth due to the extended revenue opportunities with multiple booking engines.

● Easier calculations for the accounting team

There is complete transparency in handling business payments from public travelers to travel agencies to corporate travelers. All the department managers can monitor and evaluate which product or service is the most profitable to the airline and how to leverage it.

● Great customer experience

Seamless payment options is a great advantage any industry can provide for its customers. Travel agencies can operate better with agency wallets featured with many new-age payment modes making them loyal and convenient to choose your airlines.

How can airlines serve better with an agency wallet?

● Negotiate better deals with travel agencies

 Agency wallets make travel agencies bring consistent business opportunities. Airlines could negotiate better deals with travel agencies by offering commissions or booking deals and payments done through agency wallets.

● Serve beyond satisfactory customer service

Travel agencies have a multitude of internal processes to deliver the best experiences to their travelers. Agency wallets help them reduce the time spent to initiate, and manage the payments allowing the travel agencies to get exceptional customer service.

● Straightened out internal processes

There might be some disconnect with the travelers as wallets are already available in a lot of other industries. A wallet can straighten the payment process from external sources to internal sources. Airlines can use agency wallets to properly strategize and straighten the internal process.

● Stakeholder, airline system and agreements alignment

Internal agreements or business flow might not have official documentation on agency wallets. Most airlines wouldn’t consider adding wallets as a part of their agreement, marketing, or growth plan. But that could change if wallets are properly utilized.

Conclusion

Payment innovation is a smart step to increase the bottom line of airline operations. We provide an agency wallet as a separate enhancer tool that serves as a one-point payment solution secured with trustworthy and safe policies benefiting the travel agencies who go with group bookings.

GroupRM provides a 360° group booking revenue management system assuring 23% of revenue growth from group booking.

How Airlines Can Eliminate Duplicate Group Booking Requests

How Airlines Can Eliminate Duplicate Group Booking Requests

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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 

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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

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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/. 

3-Tips-for-Exceptional-Group

3 Tips For Exceptional Group Sales Experience That Retains More Passengers

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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. 

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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. 

Who-should-control-the-group

Who Should Control The Group Sales For An Airline – Sales Or Revenue Management?

by with No Comment Blogs

Whenever a request comes in for a group booking, it is common to find sales and revenue management at loggerheads.  

Airlines generally handle group bookings manually, and in the process, confusion breaks out over whether the group’s accommodation on their preferred flight is in alignment with the airline’s revenue maximization efforts. 

Another conflict that arises is the discounts that can be given to a particular group. In this instance, the sales team looks to fill up the flight with substantial discounts, while revenue management might want to hold out for higher yield passengers.  

Making these decisions manually has made group booking a tedious process for both passengers and airlines, which means that airlines are missing out on a major opportunity to boost revenue.

What if there was a way to automate the entire process of group booking that ensured the flight was filled with high-value passengers? 

Also, what if there was a way for the sales team and revenue management to work together to adopt the best pricing strategy based on demand and the previous buying pattern of the passengers? 

How automating group booking can work wonders

Airlines can manage inventory effectively and fill their plane with the most valuable customers if they had access to a single, web-based interface for accepting and managing group requests, deciding the fare based on demand, and negotiating for providing customers with competitive pricing.  

Here are the benefits of having such a solution. 

Providing the right fares to the right groups

With the dynamic pricing capability that an automated group revenue management system provides, airlines can come up with optimal quotes in a matter of hours depending on group size, load factor, demand, nature of the trip, requested fare, etc. 

With the sales and revenue management teams in sync when it comes to policies that affect offers, the airline can also present travel agents and tour operators with personalized offers in real-time.

Making timely pricing decisions

Since customers have a lot of options in the market, they have immense leverage for negotiating fares. Airlines need to keep constant track of competitor rates and customer history to keep potential passengers from switching. 

When the process of pricing is automated, airlines can make optimized and timely decisions on everything from discounts to surge fees based on the season and sector. 

This leads to more customer retention because the long quoting times associated with manual processes inevitably lead to lost sales.  

Selling to the right group at the right time

Automation goes a long way in helping airlines prioritize which groups to cater to for maximizing revenue, especially when hundreds of group booking requests pour in. 

With the right tools, airlines can accelerate the group sales cycle, close negotiations much faster, and even boost customer spend with personalized pricing and product offers. 

Conclusion 

Increasingly, customers want better prices and more specialized offers with group bookings. Using an automated group revenue management tool, airlines can eliminate nearly all the conflict between the sales and revenue management teams and make smarter pricing decisions that fuel a faster recovery from the pandemic. This is because having a single source of data allows both sales and revenue management to collaborate in ways that will foster efficiency and better customer experience. 

MICE-Automation

MICE Automation: A growing opportunity for Airlines

by with No Comment Blogs

“Even as everyone prophesied that the rise of digital would do away with face to face business, precisely the opposite is happening now. The value of in-person meetings are rising, and the need is only getting bigger and bigger, much to the delight of the travel industry.”

Just scroll down your LinkedIn feed, and be astounded by the endorsements of countless conferences happening around the world. Surprisingly, the more people are getting plugged-in through the world wide web, the more the hunger is to have face-to-face interaction. Knowledge and doing business are no more confined to a particular tribe. MICE (Meeting Incentive, Conference, Exhibition) give people from diverse geographical locations the opportunity to connect, share and learn. But for corporates, event managers, TMCs managing travel for such large events are complex and labor intensive.

The role of Airlines

MICE industry is booming! But MICE planners are struggling to find an efficient way to manage such large scale movements of people across geographies. Airlines can make things easier by providing a platform that enables MICE group booking. This allows airlines to attract event planners to their website directly and hence reduce distribution and servicing costs.

How can airlines make conference group booking a breeze?

Though MICE is a profitable segment, the conference group request is a challenging process for the airline’s group desk. This is because airlines follow a manual process which is operationally inefficient leading to high turnaround time and error prone. However, with technology airlines can overcome the hurdles faced by the group desk in their day-to-day operation.

Furthermore, the airlines can redefine their groups business by allowing less than ten passengers from every single origin to get access to group fares as long as the overall size of the group is above their group booking threshold.

The technology breakthrough

Airlines can fulfill conference group travel request effectively with a fully automated end-to-end solution. An airline group booking tool makes it easy for customers to raise travel request mentioning multiple sources and the destination. Once the system receives the request, it responds instantly with the ideal quote. This is possible as the system can automatically calculate the fare considering several pre-set conditions. Also, through a negotiation platform customers get an opportunity to negotiate group fares. Group bookings require timely reminders for payment and name list submission. Automatic follow-up increases the probability of conversion. Over and above for monitoring purpose, the system also keeps a record of all information and generates reports accordingly. For more understanding, let’s take a closer look at how technology can combat challenges.

Faster revenue accounting process

MICE booking involves multiple request ID generations for various PNRs. Details of their sector-wise revenue and payments received from time to time are recorded manually. A little alteration may result in a mismatch in the accounting process. A group booking tool generates a single request ID for all PNRs. This helps the reporting engine to auto capture the details and maintain accurate records of various financial transactions.

Gaining visibility and control

It is difficult for the airline’s group desk analysts to track the status of every MICE request and their resulting impact on the revenue. Group Desk analyst can get complete visibility on all transactions and easily identify violators. Airlines can now efficiently run reports to see the effectiveness of their group booking program.

Group Travel is growing exponentially, and airlines around the world are consistently trying to make group traffic management more efficient. A technology solution for groups provides automation and allows airlines to pursue newer markets and reduce cost. Worlds top airlines have already started tapping this lucrative segment. Is your airline ready to take the next big leap with MICE group booking?