“Our biggest challenge was to make sure that prices shown to online customers and across interline partners are available for purchase. With PROS we resolved this challenge.”

Jolanta Rema – VP, eCommerce and Commercial Distribution, airBaltic

Company: airBaltic
Website: https://airbaltic.com/
Headquarters: Riga, Latvia
Number of employees: 1600
Founded: 1995
Industry: Airlines
Revenue: $0.5 billion
 

Challenge

airBaltic, a regional full-service carrier from the Baltics, is a relentless innovator, pushing beyond the constraints of legacy standards. Serving more than 70 destinations across Europe, the Middle East and the CIS, the was looking to ensure the best digital shopping experience on its website channel.

• The airline was suffering from unavailable or inaccurate offers on their dotcom, as well as poor availability for interline partners.
• The availability challenge was significantly impacting online conversion leading to lost bookings and low customer satisfaction not only on the airline web channel, but also across partner airlines.
• airBaltic needed an airline-controlled offer creation solution to provide fast, rich and most importantly accurate offers to customers to help improve the carrier’s retail capabilities and boost its competitiveness.

Solution

To help airBaltic solve their challenge PROS delivered its best-of-breed shopping, availability and merchandising solutions for offer creation and retailing.

• First, PROS rolled out a unified retail solution in partnership with airBaltic’s IBE – 2e systems, powered by PROS live shopping and pricing. The airline was able to now provide top shopping experience with accurate offers on their airline web channel and increase online conversion.
• Next, PROS delivered an interline availability solution to handle airBaltic’s interline offer requests with no need for PSS inventory hits. airBaltic was able to cost-efficiently offload their core reservation system from excessive transactions and unnecessary distribution cost.
• Currently, airBaltic is enhancing its retailing techniques for seats, bags and more across the direct online channel and NDC agencies. The carrier is adopting PROS merchandising for full management of their ancillary catalogue outside of ATPCO.

Results

With PROS Offer creation and retailing solutions the airline achieved significant results and an improvement in their digital retail experience.

• 500K Euro of savings were generated only in the first few months of the implementation from standalone offer creation outside of the PSS.
• The carrier’s dotcom now delivers top performance and the highest offer accuracy to customers.
• Offer bookability across interline partners is also significantly improved to drive higher conversion.

airBaltic today benefits from:

• Retail freedom to create and present richer and more competitive offers, always available for purchase.
• Fully PSS-independent offer creation across the right to fly and related ancillaries.
• Comprehensive personalization of optional products and services to maximize ancillary revenue.
• A digital-first shopping experience and more choice for customers.

In addition, airBaltic is taking their retail capabilities to new heights, adopting PROS Dynamic Ancillary Pricing to automate and optimize seat assignment pricing with the help of PROS industry-first AI. Read more about it here.