IATA Offers & Orders Webinar: Building Modern Offer Management 

We will have some time at the end of the session for replying to those questions.

For those attending for the first time, the objective of this webinar series running through April and May is to invite leading IT providers and consulting companies to share a deeper overview of their current and future solutions.

During these sessions, they also highlight their transition road map and they support and the support, sorry, they can offer airlines moving towards modern airline retailing with offers and orders.

So this year, we have a total of fourteen webinars. And for the sixth episode of the series, we are delighted to welcome pros.

So because we have a full one hour session and a full agenda today, I will briefly introduce the speakers, Justin Gender, who’s senior director for product management, and Chris Allison, director for product management, both with processing for a long time. I’m sure you know them both. So welcome to you.

And before we get into the core of our discussion, I would like to maybe suggest you start by explaining who is PROS and how can you help airlines transition to offer supporters.

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Thanks, everyone, and thanks, Anka, for hosting today. We’re we’re really looking forward to, the opportunity to present where we are on our strategy and our our vision for offers and orders. And so, yeah, your your question is a great place to start for us where you can get gonna start with who is PROS. And so, really, what you’re gonna hear throughout the presentation today around the the theme for PROS is really around our focus on offers.

And one thing that you may know about PROS is that, you know, historically, we started as a technology company specifically for airlines and then over the years grew into, other industries as we wanted to bring the the pricing concepts to other industries.

As of some recent developments that we’ve had, PROS is now exclusively a travel technology company again. And so this is really important for us because we wanna have the focus that we need, to really work for airlines directly, bringing the modern airline retailing concepts to airlines and having that as our exclusive focus. In that way, we can really make sure that the things we’re bringing really meet the needs of the airline industry. And, it it really just shows that we’re able to double down on our, sole purpose of of hitting the offer concepts, and really delivering an AI based offer management solution to airlines specifically.

So, if you know pros, you know, we have a long history in the airline industry, and that that obviously, is now just a double down focus on that. And we’re excited to do that, and we’re excited to to really be able to have that focus exclusively on the airline industry. A little bit more about PROS, we have over a hundred and thirty airline customers, across the globe. We’ve been in, the industry for over forty years now.

And, again, that’s what I talked about from our, start. We’ve been focused on the airline industry. It started as exclusively in the revenue management space, which is why we start as the number one choice for revenue management for airlines. But we wanna make sure it’s clear we’re not just the revenue management system.

We also have an offer marketing solution, that is the number one in the airline industry as well. And all of this combines together to put us at the top of the list for the offer, components that we’re really focusing on. And all of this really sets up that we wanna think about how we bring retail capabilities to the market, think about the revenue opportunities that we can bring for airlines specifically.

A few key things that we have as sort of our tenants or pillars of the of the of the, modern airline approach, we are taking our expertise in revenue management and moving that into the offer space. So we wanna take our leadership position in the revenue management space and make that into a leader position in the, offer space.

One of our key focuses is on the modularity and the interoperability between, different vendors and different systems that are needed to power modern airline retail. That has to be a central component, and we really believe in that, in that space.

And then next is focus on AI. So from the beginning of PROS, the whole point of PROS was to use data science to power the revenue management system. So as data science has evolved into what we’re seeing today across AI, that’s a natural evolution for us as well.

And we really focus on partnerships. This is something we really value heavily. You’ll see some of this throughout the the the presentation today. Partnerships for us are a central component because we wanna innovate on things that really matter to the industry.

So we select and work with key industry, experts and leaders to make sure that we’re bringing solutions to the market that are really valuable. And then in terms of value, our focus is really on not thinking about a big bang approach. We don’t wanna end at the top of the the the steps where we wanna go. We wanna think about the steps that it takes to get to that solution so that we’re providing incremental value at each step along that journey.

And we’re gonna even show you those steps as we move forward here.

So what I wanna quickly just touch on is the Prose platform itself. So across the pro’s platform, there’s a few key areas that we’re focused on. The first is I’m gonna focus on this middle part across the the section here, and the middle part really is our, core components that we’re looking at. If offers are our main central focus, then what we have to start with is the product management piece. And the product management piece focuses on product catalog, stockkeeper, and then the supplier automation to bring third party suppliers into the product management process.

The purpose there is to say if we know what we can sell, then we can make better offers. Then in the middle part here, with the offer management side, offer optimization is our central point where we say, now that we know what we can sell, how do we construct the offer? What meaning, what products do we wanna offer and what price do we wanna offer for those products? And then once you have that offer created, now we have to construct that from once we know the optimal offer, now we have to construct that into something that is consumable in the airline industry with a technology stack that scales to the to the volumes that we’re going to have across all the different channels that need to consume those offers.

And then the last piece is you’ve understood how to create those optimal offers. You know how to distribute them out to the market. But what you really want is you wanna drive people to your direct channel, and offer marketing is our means of driving people to the direct channel. And so that that way, you can really have control over the offers.

That’s done through, better search engine optimization for landing pages and dynamic ads that you can, create inside of the the the platform so that then you’re driving passengers to your direct channels.

And then at the top here is the sales channels. So specifically, PROS offers an IBE solution, an NDC solution, and the group sales solution, all serving as channels that interact with those offers that are created, in the middle layer that you see there. And, of course, the entire platform sits on top of AI as its core functionality, that that we’re building on top of. And that includes what you know about pros from forecasting and optimization techniques that we’ve been that have been around for a very long time, but also the prescriptive and or sorry. Also, the generative and agentic AI that we’re bringing into these solutions as well, that are really important for, the the evolution of, modern airline retailing as we think about the the new AI revolution that’s happening right now.

So in terms of how this is gonna look, what we’re gonna show you is a view of what our end state is for the offer management platform. And when we look at that, then we’re gonna go go into some details of the specific components for that. And but before we do that, we wanted to just highlight first, this is the IATA business reference architecture, that was published a couple years ago. It’s been a great framework that works across all the different things that you as airlines need to, work on in order to bring modern airline retailing to to the forefront.

What we’re doing specifically is around a few key areas. What you just saw on our platform, you know that the focus is gonna be on offer management and product management. Those are central components. And then we’re also bringing the seller and channel management and some pieces of customer and contract management to the picture.

What you really see is is we’re focused on the areas that drive the best offers in the market, and then we’re gonna work with other, modular components across the industry. Other vendors, other airlines that are building their own, we’ll work with them to deliver our offers to the order delivery and financial management systems and to interact with the CRM that the airline brings on their own. So you can see we’re really focused on delivering the best offers to the market. And then once we’re able to deliver those best offers, how do we then interact with the other systems that are necessary across the board?

So with that, I’m gonna turn it over to my colleague, Chris, who’s gonna dive into, the product catalog pieces.

Yeah. Exactly. So thanks, Justin. So I just wanna focus for a little bit of time on the product management domain and also why the product management domain is so important as part of the the commercial architecture. So, obviously, we all know and love ATPCO as and and the combination of price and product in their fare records as a as a construct that underpins our industry architecture and has done successfully for a long time. But if we are to move to be true retailers and be able to dynamically create and ultimately price every offer in all channels, we need to separate out the product aspect and the product definition from the price determination. And that’s why the well, the offer management system and offer optimization that does that, Justin will walk through in a moment in more detail, but I wanna focus on the product management piece and product catalog being where the the product definition takes place.

So if we can move the slide.

So, yeah, in terms of the PROS product management domain, we have three core components, the product catalog, stockkeeper, and supplier automation.

The product catalog being that central repository of all product data, the attributes, eligibility, and combinability, bundling rules, basically everything that the the other systems may need to know about the products. And the StockKeeper is that independent system of record tracking stock counts and tracking the allocations of stock units for any product at a at a SKU level. And both of these modules we’ve developed, using our expertise clearly in the airline industry, but also, in the industries that we supported prior to the the focus on the travel technology.

We had many customers using our catalog as a foundation and powering their commerce solutions.

And for they they were for highly transactional products, highly configurable prod products, and, of course, we have both in our industry.

So it was a great experience and expertise to grow upon. And, yeah, we’ve applied our, obviously, airline knowledge on top, and that’s what’s driving the the development of our catalog and and stockkeeper solutions. We also have the supplier automation module, and this is the module designed to help scale your relationships with third parties, either airlines under the supply standard retailer supplier interline agreement framework of the future or any other third parties to help manage and grow that that ecosystem.

And if we move on and this is what the ecosystem looks like when we deploy at a very high level, and we’ll grow this out as we as we go through the the the the webinar today. The product catalog and stockkeeper are deployed alongside the offer management system, and product updates and stock updates are used by offer optimization to help come up with the price.

And the offer construction module obviously brings together products, stock, price, creates the offers ready to be distributed. And, obviously, those offers are distributed as classless offers into the modern airline retailing supported channels, the direct channel, and and NDC.

Support for the hybrid model and and legacy legacy partners, we’ll talk to later on the in the transitions in the transition section.

Moving on.

I just wanted to touch on the product catalog and actually how it has to support a lot of data coming from the outside and obviously expose data to various components and and stakeholders in the the modern airline retailing world. So we’re getting, obviously, scheduling events happening across the airline, new flight schedules, schedule updates, and that’s obviously feeding into the catalog, and those events trigger the creation and update of products in in the catalog based on the various rules that that are are configured.

Third party supplier data and third party products, obviously, product data needs to get into the catalog as well.

We also get a feed from the ATPCO catalog solution of your own products and of other airline products, especially in the hybrid case, where, the existing fare records Looks like we have lost Chris.

I I think you dropped.

You’re back.

Good. I’m sorry.

See you now.

No worries. I needed I needed ten seconds work. I was just saying that the ATPCO connection, it helps us in the in the hybrid case, we’ll I’ll describe that in more detail later.

And product catalog data and product data is used clearly by the offer management system, but also a subset of that data is exposed to sellers and aggregators in the form of the airline profile to help with their shopping decisions.

Supply catalog shared to other airline partners in particular to help them shop in a in a smart way. And, also, we can feed product data back to the ATPCO catalog for distribution to other airlines or suppliers, and, again, in the hybrid case, which I’ll describe later. So, yeah, if we move on.

And with all of this complexity and the bigger range of products and the more complex way that you can describe your products and the and the rich information that’s there, Obviously, that that brings complexity in terms of the user experience. So one thing that’s a focus is for us is not just on building out the best product database we can, but also the best tools for user built and manage those those products as well.

So, obviously, it’s all based on self-service and automation so that, yeah, you can empower your users to to handle your products in the in the most effective way.

And, also, with AI agents deployed both for catalog navigation as things get more complex, and also to recommend, for example, bundles, static bundles to be used by offer management, not replacing the dynamic bundles that may be created in the offer construction and optimization phase, but using various data points from from around the airline to serve a product, combinability and bundling recommendations in in the catalog prior to the offer phase.

And now I just wanna change tack to the the stockkeeper real quick.

And the obviously, then we we recognize the need for it to be as the heart of the airline, all done. So, clearly, the the the stockkeeper is gonna be central to both offer management. And, obviously, when it comes to order creation and and delivery, we need to make sure that stockkeeper is is always available.

It also we see the need for it to be independent from the PSS and the order management system. The stockkeeper isn’t just lumped inside of an operational system because that’s where it has lived before.

It’s a clear it’s clear that the it’s a commercial system that should be used to support the growth of the business and not tied to an operational system. It really needs to be have that commercial focus.

We also understand the need for very granular stock counters. So it’s not just a case of counting the number of seats on an aircraft. We and I’ll I’ll describe in more detail some of the counters that we we support.

And finally, obviously, clearly, the stock data is needed across the the ecosystem internally for for you as an airline, but also needs to support the hybrid world as other airlines and and the rest of the ecosystem catches up. And, again, we’ll describe that in in more detail in the transition phase.

Now in terms of the counters, this is a view of the of the stock record, very basic. It’s configurable, so there are more counters that can be can be can be used, but I just wanna walk through some of the typical ones. So you can click once, then we have, basically, the SKU, which is that unique identifier for the stock record, the stock keeping units linked to one or more product IDs. So if you have, for example, two economy products linked to the same, stock counter, of course, that’s supported.

And now moving on, we obviously can define the original capacity, of a given product. It might be the number of seats, on a on an aircraft, for instance. And then, you can define how many of those you want to be considered for for sale. Obviously, that can be less, the same, or more than the initial capacity.

For example, the the if more, it supports overbooking scenarios. But rather than the capacity, the allowed for sale counter is what will be used by the the in all the computations for what can what can be sold.

You can also define which stock has been removed. So we’re not removing account from capacity or allowed for sale. We’re actually counting separately which stock has been specifically removed and why it’s not no longer allowed for sale for given the the the initial capacity. So it can be, of course, a broken seat on an aircraft. It could be for whatever weight balance whatever reason you want to remove a unit of stock, it’s recorded and and tracked.

And then the usable stock buy offer management, which is a, obviously, a key metric, is then computed from and, well, it can be defined as to how it’s computed based on these counters, but, yeah, ultimately, it’s computed by what you’re allowing for sale.

Obviously, remove any removed stock and then any of that have been allocated against any any orders. I’m clicking once more.

In terms of what we’re counting against orders, basically, stock that has been allocated to a committed order, so so an order essentially that’s been paid or committed payment has been committed, obviously, clearly, that’s tracked. And also anything that’s been allocated to an order, so unit of inventory or unit stock has been counted, but has not yet been paid, that’s also counted.

And then we also have moving on the pending and waitlist counters.

The pending is kind of akin to a temporary hold. Maybe not to be confused with the the typical kind of whole book and hold scenarios today, but that could be someone, for example, who is in the the checkout flow in your IBE.

We count how many we we can count, and you can use that in certain computations if you wish.

How many orders may end up being allocated or how many units of stock may be allocated to orders in the future?

Clearly, that hasn’t been kind of decremented from the the remaining counter yet, but it’s obviously good met a good data point to use in in offer management decisions in in future.

And I can hand back to Justin.

Great. Thanks, Chris. So, yeah, once we kinda have that product in the stock set up, the next question is is how does that feed into the offer management system? And so for us, offer management really consists of two key pillars.

And I showed them before, but I think it’s really important that we emphasize this because from from our side, offer management really has to consist of an offer optimization step and an offer construction piece. Why we separate those two out is because what we don’t want is we don’t want in the offer management side to just have a line item that says price and just sort of assume that price gets generated for all of these offers that we’re creating. Instead, offers offer optimization has to be a first class citizen in the offer management piece because the the history that we have with building revenue doing revenue management is going to absolutely continue moving forward in the offer optimization space.

And so we wanna make sure that that’s clear that offer optimization is a central part of offer management. And then once you have that offer that optimal offer created, then you can actually go and construct that for the industry and distribute it out to the world. Now how does that look from the pro side? So for us, we wanna illustrate what this offer platform looks like.

So it starts out with the pros offer management box, and I I’m certain you can guess that we’re gonna fill in that box with things. But before we do that, we wanna just level set on how the process flows. So this sort of represents a capability, set of capabilities, but also how, the interaction works with the other systems. So first off, you have the channels that call out to the offer management box as part of an offer request.

So those can be shopping touch points, upsell check touch points, and reshopping touch points that make a call out from a channel into the offer box.

Now the offer management system obviously has to have a lot of data that can feed into it so that it can make its decisions. Those that that data consists of things like orders, from the order management system, customer data from the CRM.

It also includes the stockkeeper and product catalog that Chris just showed us before, and we also have to have the offer store for the historical offers that we’ve created that all feed into the offer management box. So now what we have is the offer management box understanding the request that came in for an offer from the specific channel, and we understand all the data that feeds into the offer system so that then the offer system can start doing its job. Now this starts first with the initialization of the offer through the offer construction piece. This sets up all of kind of the determination of of what we can actually sell to the passenger.

So before we send it to the offer optimization system, we need to understand from the product catalog, not just what we can sell, but specific to the context in the request, what can we sell. So we do this context determination. We look at what products we can sell, any sort of ranking that we have. We build itineraries.

All of this creates the package of what we can actually sell to this passenger given all of the constructs from the stockkeeper, the catalog, the CRM, the order system, and the offer store, all feeding us that information.

Naturally, the next step is once we have that first bit of the offer constructed knowing what we can sell to the passenger, we go into the offer optimization step. And this is where the key components of revenue management, dynamic pricing of both right to fly and ancillaries, the bundling concepts, and the segmentation, and we also have this pricing and, RM strategy engine there. So think about this as, like, forecast demand influences that you have in place today. Those types of things all still live inside of offer optimization because those are feeding into the the overall offer optimization step so that then we can create what are the products that we’re going to sell to the passenger, and what are the prices that we’re going to apply to those.

And now that you’ve completed that offer optimization step, you go into the finalization piece with offer construction again. Now we need to go through and say, okay. Well, what are the taxes and fees and surcharges that we have based off of that offer that was generated in the offer optimization box? Do we have any sort of post pricing discounts that we wanna apply, any promotions?

Also, any sorting and filtering that we wanna apply because we’re gonna tell the channel that’s gonna receive this offer. We’re gonna tell them what so what order should you display that in. And so all of that comes with it. And the last piece is the rich media side.

So one of the things about creating an offer is if you wanna sell somebody a a hamburger, it’s great to be able to show a picture of that hamburger. And so the rich media says, in addition to the offer saying there’s included this meal or this this particular item and the price for it, we also say this is the photo you should use to, to display that. So all of that creates the offer that then we have a response back to the channel that says, here is the offer that we’ve created through the offer up through the offer management system at PROS. So this is the end state where we’re going to get to and what we’re building right now out.

And the key part there is that what we’re the way we’re approaching this is that we already have the capabilities through traditional, shopping and merchandising as well as through traditional revenue management, pricing, etcetera. We’re bringing those components into an offer management box, taking the independent and and kind of in stand alone products and bringing them together into a true offer management solution that leverages those as capabilities inside of an offer management box. And I think that’s a really important distinction because the things that we’re doing in modern airline retailing with offer management aren’t unique to what we’re doing today.

It’s just today, they’re very fragmented into different processes. And offer management allows us to bring those together into a centralized place, allowing us to think about the decisions that are being made across the entire offer process. And, really, that’s important because, again, with today’s fragmented approach, you may not know what was offered to the passenger when you’ve, from the first time they visited the your website to the second time, or even what they were offered during the shopping flow versus, later on during check-in. And that’s the type of thing we wanna bring to this approach so that now we’re making better offers as we move forward, with with the with, creating offers for the passenger.

I wanna just highlight a few things on the offer optimization side with our key pillars. There’s three things that we really see as the key pillars for it. First is revenue management. I like to emphasize this very strongly here. The core concepts of revenue management aren’t going away.

This is often talked about that, like, revenue management is dead and things like that. I don’t buy into that at all, and PROS doesn’t buy into that. And the reason is is because the things that we’re doing in revenue management set us up for success in the offer optimization space. And so by having the core concepts of overbooking and decrement, the bid prices that we create, all of those things that we’re doing today are still going to be central in the offer optimization space.

And so I assume for most of you as airlines, you’re not planning to stop doing overbooking. You’re not planning to stop understanding the capacity constraint of your flights. So those are still gonna be central components. It’s how that’s used in the overall optimization process.

And so that actually goes to the next step on continuous pricing. So being able to move to continuous pricing is an is a natural step. Revenue management today sets controls for availability. That doesn’t mean that revenue management, the process that it’s doing isn’t extendable to a continuous pricing world.

And so, obviously, continuous pricing opens up the the the door to having more price points, ultimately being able to find the exact right price for a given context of the passenger. And so, really, this is the the the next natural step. And this can be done in a world where you still filed fares, where you do discounts off of the filed fares, all the way into a world where you’re just directly calculating the price. And this works in both a right to fly and a dynamic ancillary pricing, approach.

So ancillaries and right to fly are central pieces to, the the the offer optimization step.

So in terms of offer creation, the there are three key areas as well that we’re really focused on here. The first is this idea of the legacy pricing translator. And and when we think about this, you know, it it’s interesting when you’re talking about building out the brand new offer offer management system. The first thing that we’re gonna talk about is the legacy pricing translation.

And the reason for that is the legacy pricing isn’t going away, anytime soon, and many of you know that for all the different ways that you’re using that today. So as we think about the offer construction side, we really have to make sure that we’re still enabling you to use the the constructs that you have today with ATPCO filed fares and so forth. And so that’s a central part of the the offer construction and offer management platform is being able to map back to what’s still in place today. Now, ultimately, where where we know the industry wants to go is this idea of being able to directly calculate the price for the given product and the bundle for the given product.

And so what we’re focused on is building out a a platform that allows us to work in where we want to go, but also maps back to that legacy, approach that we have in place today. And that’s really important because we’re able to think about it from a holistic perspective as we, as we create the offer construction platform piece of offer management.

Now one thing we talked about before in the beginning was was creating incremental steps to the the the ultimate goal that we have, which is total offer optimization. Now total offer optimization means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And, but what from a pro’s perspective, the whole concept is to really understand the passenger profile, not now to the individual passenger level, but at a segmentation level, understand the passenger, create an offer for that passenger that they really like based on their their characteristics, for their segment, and then apply a price that ultimately maximizes revenue for the airline and, in drives conversion as well for the passenger.

Now, ultimately, we can create the science that goes with that, create the AI algorithms that define that, but there’s also a lot of incremental steps that you can take that drive value as you work towards that. And from pros experience, trying to make one big jump to the end state has a lot of issues when you start trying to give this out to adoption to the market, whether it’s to your sales team, whether it’s to your your users in the revenue management side, a lot of people have to be bought into the new concepts that you’re bringing. So instead, what we’re focused on is creating these steps along the the journey to that.

The first, on the left hand side, we’ve kinda break this up into right to fly and ancillaries. This isn’t the exact prescribed set of steps. You can mix and match, do some of the left, some of the right. You can also skip steps if your airline’s ready for that.

But the whole idea here is to first say, you need to be doing dynamic availability and using bid prices because bid prices are a foundational component of the right to fly dynamic pricing side.

Once you have that, you need to start thinking about things in terms of price elasticity, really modeling the behavior of demand as it relates to changes in price. So as you increase price, how does demand change? How does demand react to that change?

Then once you have that price elasticity, you can naturally do a continuous pricing step. Because now if you understand elasticity, you can pick the right point on that curve to understand what price you should charge the passenger that maximizes revenue, And that pairs with the bid price side. And I won’t go into details today, but if you’re interested, we certainly can go into more detail. The the way that we do continuous pricing works in a class based, RBD based world to create those discounted, discount factors, but then that drives the next step into how do we, create more context aware price elasticity.

So the first step in elasticity is just doing that at sort of the average dimensions of elasticity. But the next step is what are the other things that drive elasticity for your passengers and creating that more dynamic elasticity estimation process then drives a better price. And then all of that steps into from the price estimation side, how can we determine the right price without the barrier of RVD in this process? It may be the case that you still need distribution lens with, RVDs, but it doesn’t mean that your revenue management and pricing side has to be tied to those prices.

And so that’s something we’re looking at is how do you bring the RVD approach to this. And I’ll note on the left hand side here, these numbers are real numbers that we’ve seen in terms of revenue uplift when implementing those various solutions.

And so all of those things are things that we’ve implemented in in some form or fashion in those different steps with different airlines. On the right hand side, this really takes us into the the ancillary piece. It starts with just doing dynamic ancillary pricing and then takes you into doing the upsell amounts between brands. This is a key unlock here.

And what you’re gonna hear a lot on the theme on the right hand side is if you wanna get to true offer optimization, you you might have to throw away the entire concept of brands. And what my experience is and and what we’ve seen in the market is that airlines aren’t ready to throw away the concept of brands. You spent a lot of time getting passengers to understand what those brands are. But so that’s why the first unlock in terms of brands is to dynamically price how much you upsell between those brands.

That’s a huge up opportunity because that’s an area that’s very unexplored in today’s world. Then you can start doing a la carte bundle creation. So after the brand has been selected, you can then do an a la carte bundle dynamically, and then we can start thinking about the future of brands. Do you want to have a predefined set for the to for the the selection mechanism to choose from?

That’s what we mean by dynamic brand determination. Ultimately, stepping into product bundling, which then says, how do we actually create those brands if you want, dynamically, creating the the full bundle? And then that takes you into offer optimization where now we’re creating the concept of right to fly and products together in a single decision process. Now I went through that really quickly, and I went through that quickly, because we’re we’re short on time.

If you’re interested in any more detail, we can certainly go into that, as we move forward.

Now the next thing that we wanna talk about is how do you transition to this? Naturally, you can see that this is a transition path. Right? Ultimately, you’re working up through these steps to create this transition as you go through these up to total offer optimization. But it’s not just the transition that happens on the the the the, offer optimization side, but also on the offer construction side. How do we put all of this together into a picture?

Now first, I wanna highlight just a few things because also in this transition is where we’re exploring how modularity works between this. And so, we have three examples of airlines that have deployed or are deploying the continuous pricing concept in the world where it still works inside of the RBD system of ATPCO, by, working through, the discount adjustment factors that we’re creating, through continuous pricing and then applying those. And those are a few examples with Lufthansa, Air Canada, and Japan Airlines that are working with this. And so we’re really excited about the opportunity that this is creating, and it’s it’s been a really great testimony to how we can take something in today’s world and modernize the the the continuous pricing approach, but still inside of the constructs that we have with filed fares, the PSS, and so forth that are still required in the market today.

Now how do we create this flow from today’s world to the future world? So what I’m gonna level set with is the concept of today’s world has a PSS that feeds PNR inventory and schedule all baked inside of the PSS, feeds that into the revenue management system. The revenue management system feeds controls to some sort of availability or, continuous pricing box, and that’s for pros. That’s the RTDP solution there.

That gets, the PSS feeds that real time inventory. And then once that’s all held in that system, then you have the request come in from a channel. The channel feeds and asks the shopping engine for price and or availability.

The answer comes back as an RVD based availability, the adjustment factor included with that, and then the shopping engine knows how to look up that availability, find the right price or find the right, fair basis code, etcetera, that matches and apply the adjustment factor and send that out to the channel. So now the answer that’s been given out to the channel is an ATPCO a RBD based price with an adjustment factor applied. So that level sets on what’s possible in today’s world.

The transition here is how do we start thinking about this changing in the new world as we think about it moving forward? And one big step as we think about it moving forward is we introduce the concept of order, stockkeeper, and catalog into the process. And so now the order system provides the orders. The stockkeeper provides stock, the in the inventory concept, and the catalog provides the the concept of the sellable products to those.

So now you can see, just as Chris talked about, we broke free of one system holding all of this information into dedicated systems that really understand what’s needed in those. And now those systems can feed revenue management and the continuous pricing side. And then, also, we’ve introduced now instead of a shopping engine, we’ve introduced the offer construction piece. So you can see how these three pieces in the middle right here are evolving into offer optimization and offer construction as we start introducing the other components like stockkeeper and catalog that feed those.

So the transition we see is really going from today’s world where you interact with the PSS to provide you all of that information to starting to think about how do you peel out the components that are necessary from that and then modernizing the pieces of revenue management, the continuous pricing side, and the offer construction piece into a full offer management system that then takes us into the picture that we saw before where now all of those components that were inside of shopping and merchandising get brought all in together here. And what I showed you before was just the flow for right to fly.

There’s a similar flow that’s separate in today’s world for ancillaries. Now we’re bringing that all together into one offer management box.

So with that, I’m gonna turn it back over to Chris. Again, I recognize that was very quick, description of that, and but we are certainly happy to go into more detail on that if anything piqued your interest as we went through it.

With that, Chris, I’ll hand it back over to you.

Yeah. Thank you. So I’m coming back to our product management ecosystem diagram to describe how we can also support this in the the transition phase. Obviously, Justin described quite a few of the benefits, but, yeah, if we can just click real quick, and then we should be able to start building out what this will look like. So if we build it one more to support, basically, deploying a modern airline retailing architecture, but supporting legacy channels so if we can just click the slide.

And if we click on yeah. There we go.

Obviously, legacy channels, be they your legacy insulin partners who haven’t moved towards modern airline retailing yet or the existing legacy distribution channels, clearly need to continue to receive and and use fares from ATPCO. But if you’re using the product catalog stockkeeper and creating offers in the way Justin just described, we’re gonna need to start getting product data from the catalog into ATPCO. And this is one fee that we’ve already been looking at as part of recent POCs with ATPCO and part of the IATA modularity POC activity. And we also need a mechanism for getting price information from the the the price determination decisions in in the offer management system also to ATPCO so that, obviously, those fare records can be updated accordingly without losing the synchronization.

Now, clearly, the offers that are being created are gonna be far richer in the modern airline retailing environment and supported by your NDC indirect and your your direct channels. But at least you can continue to support for as long as you need to the the GDS and the in legacy insulin partner channels.

Obviously, what’s missing from this is the availability calculation and and feeds. So if we can click through one more.

So we, as part of this architecture, deploy an offer translator, which handles the the cabin to class mapping, basically taking the stock data and taking other data from the offer management system, such as bid price, using rules that are configured around how you want those classes to be mapped and how the available availability should be computed and then distributed, and then ultimately exposing a class based availability fees to those legacy channels.

Now the key thing is all of the decisions and rules and content, everything’s contained inside your modern online retailing architecture. So your rich offers using all of the data and all of the the the the processes and solutions that Justin described, Obviously, that can be that’s something that you can benefit from as the airline moving in this direction, but you don’t have to switch off those important legacy channels in in the interim.

Now I just wanna quickly segue into kind of the modularity topic because that’s so important when it comes to moving transitioning. Right? So Justin mentioned being able to take value at every step, and the fact that we’ve actually to be able to do that, you have to deploy these components not as a big bang. And we’ve been showing how modularity can actually come to life not just by having some APIs and saying, yes, you can use them, but actually in production ready POCs that that we we demonstrated last year, and we’re continuing to innovate on for for this year and and this round of of POCs. Now this was the iAATOM and Modern Ireland Retailing Consortium who asked us to come together as vendors and show demonstrate use cases.

And, actually, maybe we can just build the whole slide. There’s there’s three in total. We demonstrated two use cases showing an end to end offer, order, delivery flow, where PROS is providing, in both cases, the offer management system with shopping and dynamic pricing, and the product management system with the product catalog stockkeeper. It was completely legacy free from the from the ground up on the office side and then through to the the order and delivery side.

And now in in case one, actually, sorry. Another vendor provided the the channels and the orchestration. And in the second use case, PROS actually provided the channel and the orchestration showing that from modularity perspective, we we were essentially agnostic to that that model. We could slower components in wherever were were were needed, and that was actually end to end using real data, but not underpinned by by legacy at any any point.

And in the third use case, that was where we demonstrated out what I mentioned in terms of that bilateral data exchange with ATPCO, where we could exchange x where we could receive extracts of fare records, the only the product specific information, so nothing about price and pricing rules, and also pass the data back to ATPCO, the product specific data to then be exposed to the airlines that that need it on the other side.

And that can support either modern airline retailing product feeds or the, like I said, the legacy fare data sorry, the legacy product data from the the fares.

And with that, I think I have one more slide, which yeah. I just wanna kind of swing back around to some of the the the key points that Justin made earlier because this is really what why we think, basically, our solutions are gonna help with that transition to to modern now and reselling. Ultimately, obviously, maintaining that leadership position and offer, obviously, we wanna make sure that we’re we’re able to give you those best commercial outcomes, but also with that product management as as a foundation.

The modularity and interoperability, it’s obviously the it sounds like the the buzzword of the moment, but it’s so vital that you are able to have your the components that you want to drive your commercial strategy.

You wanna select the ones that are best for your for for the strategy that you have in mind, And that in that, for example, includes being having an independent channel layer to the the PSS, for instance, being able to then pick and choose your commercial components as needed, the offer construction of optimization, product catalog, stocky book, all of the modules that that go into building up your architecture. It’s super important that you’re able to select individually rather than be constrained to, yeah, one one ecosystem.

Justin, again, mentioned the the AI driven revenue maximization, and that is also underpinned by those product management solutions as well.

And actually and the innovation partnership piece, it’s very and what actually we’ve proven in the past and we wanna continue to prove is that a key turning point in the industry, we’ve worked with the leading airlines and early adopters at each phase and, yeah, in the especially in this offer optimization, offer construction, and project management phase, obviously, wanna continue to do that and continue proving that, yeah, we’re the the the true co innovation partner. And, yeah, finally, making sure that, actually, we can already start today and generate value, start that transition without having to take that big bang approach and have that whether it’s whether you need a business case, every step to move, or just see value from every step of the transition. That’s something that we can deliver with, hopefully, everything we’ve described to you so far today. So with that, I think I can pass back I think we have a a holding slide. We pass back to Anke for the the q and a.

Thank you very much. It has been a marathon. Lots of information, greatly presented, but lots of it. And I would encourage, as you were saying, Justin, earlier, I would encourage all the airlines that are in this call not only to contact you because that definitely needs more, in-depth discussion. And I’m sure that there’s more that you just have time to say during this webinar session. So for those of you, in the audience that would like to contact PROS, you have their email address, right, either on this slide under their names.

And we do have, we have received actually some questions. And, and let me start with, you know, Chris, you you talked extensively about your smart stock keeper.

So why would an headline want to separate out the product catalog and the stockkeeper from the order management system?

Yeah. It’s and, yeah, it’s actually a really important step. And in other industries, we’ve seen this, and we see it as important for our industry as well, that they are key key foundational components for any commercial architecture. The obviously, the first step of any offer order, settle, deliver flow is the offer. Without the offer, the rest of the flow is is is is needed. Right? So it’s important to make sure that the offer management system has the right product information so that it can create the best offers.

And the the stock the stockkeeper and all of the different counters and all of the data that it can expose to the offer management system, yeah, it’s important that that’s not locked away in a system designed for operational robustness, but is designed to really enhance the commercial outcomes for the airline. So we see those as fundamental commercial components rather than operational components. Sure.

And then you next question that I that I have for you guys is, in your transition views, I think the question that I heard most is to RBD or not to RBD. You know? I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare here, but, I mean, do you think that’s intentional? I did you do it on purpose or it was slip?

It was definitely intentional. I I think what we’re seeing in the market is that there are airlines that that are saying they’re they always want to file fares, and they always wanna have the RBD as sort of a backdrop. It creates a lot of value to airlines by filing these fares and having this this construct out there in the world that allows you to, you know, report back to the government how many fares at a certain level you have. There’s a lot of reasons that it provides a lot of value.

And so from and then there’s other airlines that say, don’t want it at all. I I want it gone. And, you know, it’s it’s it’s an old construct, etcetera, etcetera. And so from our side, we want to make sure that we’re building towards both worlds.

And so the the you know, you might think, well, how do you do continuous pricing in a world where you pre file fares? Well, to to frankly, that’s what we’re doing today where you create the the you do the math based off of the filed fares, but then we can create these adjustment factors, these discounts or adjustment factors off of the the lowest available class that then says, I’m giving a favorable price to a passenger because now I can pinpoint where in between two filed fares I want to charge. And so the opportunity is there in an RVD world. But, of course, the the the beauty of what we create is that our math works to also directly calculate a price.

And so the AI algorithms that we’ve put in place for our context driven dynamic pricing, it works in a class based, RVD based world and not. And so it’s intentional when we talk about it that way to make sure that we’re covering the case where maybe you want to move away from RVDs, but you know it’s gonna be a while. We have a solution there, and we also are creating that pathway. And, also, we have a solution where if you never want to move away from RVDs, we feel that we feel that we can work within that construct as well.

And so that that was intentional and, and, you know, I think fits that, that that model of different airlines have different approaches they wanna take to this.