FareNet is PROS’s proprietary pixel which, when placed in an airline’s booking engine and configured, enables PROS to collect all flight information, fares, and anonymous user activities that occur during the natural course of user flight search and purchase in an airline’s booking engine.
FareNet refreshes a fare every time a user searches for that flight in the airline booking engine and streams that fare into production in real-time for maximum accuracy – average of roughly 90%.
Traditional fare cache tools refresh at set intervals and disseminates via batch processing.
Volatile fares are more likely to be inaccurately presented by a fare cache; however, fare volatility is correlated to increased flight purchase (and search).
With FareNet, the more frequently a flight is searched and purchased, the more often FareNet refreshes the fare being disseminated. This results in a “self-fulfilling prophecy” where FareNet is updating the fares more frequently for the flights with the highest search volume (which have volatile fares).
Traditional fare cache tools treat all flights equally – the fare for a high search volume, highly volatile flight is refreshed just as frequently as a low search volume flight.
Die USDOT regulations require that digital promotion of fares to consumers be executed in a way that puts forth maximum reasonable effort to ensure accuracy and, more importantly, correct inaccuracy as soon as possible.
The FareNet method on airTRFX fully complies with these regulations – if a user clicks on a FareNet-aggregated fare on airTRFX and finds a different fare in the booking engine, FareNet is immediately refreshing that fare to match that seen by the user in the booking engine.
Traditional fare cache tools do not react immediately to remedy a fare inaccuracy.
Because FareNet populates in real-time the DataCore™ system with fares seen by actual user, it is possible to increase the volume of fares in DataCore by the following methods:
PROS’s average accuracy of 90% is based on real-world measurement of the fare selected by users on airTRFX and the percentage of time it matches the fare displayed by the airline in its booking engine. We define accuracy in this way to ensure our calculation of accuracy is weighted to reflect the volume of flight search for each flight – not all flights are treated the same.
Traditional fare cache tools measure accuracy by running a bulk refresh across all flights in the cache and comparing the accuracy of the refreshed fares to the prior fares. This method does not reflect the reality of the user experience.
