The announcement comes just as you’re getting ready to board: your family’s flight has been canceled. The airline manages to get you onto another flight leaving the following morning, but that’s where the good news ends.
The new flight is on a different type of aircraft with fewer rows; your pre-paid extra legroom seat is gone, and your family is split across the cabin. The pre-ordered kids’ meals didn’t transfer and it’s too late to place orders for the new flight. The airline puts you up for the night at a random hotel, not your preferred chain. Your checked luggage won’t be available until morning; it’s already staged for the early departure. When your children fall asleep the moment they hit the beds, you set a 5 a.m. alarm and try to do the same.
The next morning’s flight takes off on schedule, but by the time you land, the minivan you reserved for your original arrival time is gone. The only thing left is a compact. You’ll have to find something else with another company while simultaneously keeping two overtired under-twelves from dismantling the rental car counter. And later, filing a travel insurance claim about the delay means navigating a separate website, submitting copies of two itineraries, and scanning in a stack of receipts.
No one warned you any of this would happen.
Multiply this incident across the hundreds of thousands of passengers every year, and it makes sense why flight delays are the most common passenger complaint in North America1 and why trust and reliability rank among the top factors travelers cite when choosing an airline.2
From Fares to Offers
As airline leaders know better than anyone, the culprit behind such bad experiences isn’t poor service but a tangle of systems never designed to work together. The commercial infrastructure built for a different era is now stretched well past its original design, and everyone feels the strain.
Most airlines still sell within fare class-based frameworks never built to carry the weight of a modern, ancillary-rich travel experience. Everything’s in separate systems, organized by different records and data structures, with workarounds that have compounded for decades. One system tracks the flight, another tracks ancillaries, and airlines have done their best to deliver the appearance of an offer without actually putting everything together. The seams rupture when life happens and various parts of your purchase need to change in unison. The burden of reconciling them lands squarely on the one person who shouldn’t have to deal with it: the traveler.
This disconnect has been part of the landscape for so long it can start to feel like the cost of doing business. But it doesn’t have to be.
The offer is the complete experience customers expect from the moment of purchase. It’s the promise airlines make, and when disruption hits, that promise needs to be kept. The good news is that airlines genuinely want to keep this promise because it’s their business to deliver stress-free travel experiences. When they deliver a dependable and reliable product with a smile, they share in the joy of making delightful memories for travelers connecting with places, family, and friends.
Airlines have long understood the value of offer systems, investing heavily in sophisticated revenue management and pricing solutions to help ensure flights are available for passengers ready to purchase. But with back-office reservation systems too rigid to fulfill more creative offer constructs, those efforts could only go so far. Rightly, airlines are now focused on replacing these legacy reservation systems, distributing offers via NDC platforms, and rebuilding transactional infrastructure from the ground up so they can deliver compelling offers that maximize conversion and lift revenue. Airlines recognize that in the world of Offer and Order, Offer is where the money is made, and Order is where the money is retained.
Because fare class architectures have always dictated the boundaries of offer design, starting with what the system allows rather than what the traveler wants, it’s become the mission of modern airline retailing to change these constraints. And the business case is too compelling to ignore. McKinsey estimates that modern retailing could unlock $45 billion in new value for the global airline industry by 2030, with $13 billion of that revenue from new offers alone.3 This translates to a revenue uplift of 2 to 3 percent for individual airlines, or up to 15 percent of EBITDA. BCG has called this an airline retail revolution.4
When someone shops on any modern ecommerce storefront, like Amazon, they browse a catalog to add items to their cart, and then the retailer manages everything as a unified experience. Anyone who has spent hours manually assembling a single trip—flights, seats, bags, meals, hotels, cars, insurance, excursions—knows exactly how far the travel shopping experience still lags behind modern ecommerce standards, most notably because the entire purchase revolves around the travel date and time (change the date, and everything attached to it hast to change too). Modern airline retailing will drive every airline to become a digital retailer that keeps its promises through the entire passenger journey, whatever disruptions may arise.
Treating the offer as the primary commercial product will shift the economics. More relevant offers—designed, priced, and delivered with intention—convert better. Travelers who receive what they paid for come back. Wallet share grows because airlines have earned the right to sell more. McKinsey’s 2025 survey of global air travelers found that while price remains the top booking criterion, ease of booking and brand trust rank nearly as high.5 Airlines win on all three when they get the offer right.
– Sunil John, Chief Executve Officer, PROS
Well-designed offers drive airline revenue while better serving the traveler. This win-win gets lost when modernization focuses exclusively on the order.
Modern Retailing, Meet Modern Technology
The technology to align what airlines want to offer, what travelers want to buy, and what travelers actually receive is finally catching up.
The first development is the modern product catalog: a unified repository that brings flights, ancillaries, and third-party services together in one place. For the first time, airlines can create, bundle, and modify offers with the speed and flexibility legacy architectures never allowed. Changes that once took weeks of cross-system coordination will soon take only minutes or hours. An airline can construct a Monday morning business travel special from Mexico City to Houston—bundling seat, meal, lounge access, preferred hotel rate—and populate it across every channel the same day within minutes. This kind of commercial agility simply wasn’t possible before, and it’s exactly the kind of offer that converts.
The second development is agentic AI, whose implications for airline retailing go well beyond internal productivity gains. Consider what happens when AI agents begin shopping, planning, and booking travel on behalf of travelers simultaneously, around the clock, across every channel. The look-to-book ratio that exploded when the internet arrived will look modest by comparison. Airlines whose offer management infrastructure delivers relevant responses at that speed and volume will capture demand others never see.
PROS has spent 40 years building AI science specifically for the airline industry, analyzing market signals, optimizing pricing, and managing demand at a scale that processes more than 400 million prices and 1.7 billion forecasts every day. Every system we build carries an agentic interface so any external agent can query it without a human intermediary. This foundation makes offer excellence at agentic scale achievable today across every sales, distribution, and marketing channel, so you can continue to outperform even as you transform your business.
The Offer That Keeps Its Promise
Now reimagine the same disruption on a modern retailing system.
Before any gate announcement, your phone alerts you that your flight is at risk. The airline presents two alternative routings for the following morning that fulfill your entire offer, including flights, seat assignments, and other ancillaries. Both keep your family seated together and recommend new meals more suitable for the morning flight time, automatically giving you credit for the meals you had pre-ordered for the canceled flight. A single tap confirms the rebooking.
The airline also anticipates the overnight stay. Proactively, it offers you a room at your preferred hotel chain, which recognizes your loyalty status and upgrades your room. Lounge passes arrive on your phone for use before the next day’s flight. When you reach the hotel, fresh essentials kits are waiting, compliments of the airline. Since you chose the later of the two routing offers, everyone gets a decent night’s sleep.
On your rebooked flight, your family is seated together. The minivan you originally reserved is waiting at your destination, updated to reflect your new arrival time. Your travel insurance initiates a claim on your behalf automatically. No separate website, no receipts to scan, no forms to fill out while managing two cranky and exhausted offspring.
Not once do you have to chase anything down, call anyone, or navigate a website you didn’t ask to visit. You don’t feel lucky. You feel taken care of.
There’s a meaningful difference between a passenger who feels fortunate to have weathered a bad situation and one who simply trusts that their airline will deliver on its promises. Airlines earn loyalty not by avoiding disruption but by mastering it and offering the right gestures to ease the traveler’s pain.
The Offer Is the Opportunity
None of these changes require a different airline, just an approach to the offer that treats the traveler’s complete journey—not just their seat—as the product. The next era of airline retailing belongs to airlines that master this shift.
With Agentic AI, travel will be smoother. Instead of navigating fare class matrices and disconnected booking systems, a traveler will simply have a conversation with an AI agent. They’ll say what they want—the schedule, the preferences, the budget, the constraints—and the agent will assemble offers by communicating with other AI agents in the background using standard APIs and protocols. Agents also coordinate among systems when disruption hits—updating ancillaries, notifying hotels, adjusting car reservations, initiating insurance claims—all without the traveler lifting a finger.
– Sunil John, Chief Executve Officer, PROS
Offer excellence, at its best, is a system that keeps its promises through the entire journey. Airlines that invest in the offer now by building modern catalogs, pricing intelligence, and agentic infrastructure to deliver on every promise they make to travelers will define what travelers expect from every airline, everywhere, every time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Building offers based on travelers’ preferences, instead of fare class-based frameworks, increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, driving higher conversion rates and repeat purchases
By offering relevant and customizable options, such as seat upgrades or unique travel packages, airlines can create a more enjoyable travel experience, leading to higher satisfaction and brand loyalty.
A modern product catalog allows airlines to create, bundle, and modify offers with unprecedented speed and flexibility, replacing legacy architectures that required weeks of coordination. Now, changes can be made in minutes, enabling airlines to construct and deploy offers that convert across all channels.
Instead of requiring travelers to spend hours manually assembling a single trip—flights, seats, bags, meals, hotels, cars, insurance, excursions—airlines can offer simplified digital shopping experiences similar to what travelers have come to expect from other ecommerce platforms.
Agentic AI will dramatically increase the volume of shopping requests. Airlines with offer management systems capable of handling this speed and scale will be able to capture demand that their competitors miss.
