As Porter Airlines expands across North America, it’s revamping its revenue management strategy to stay ahead in a competitive market. Traditional class-based forecasting wasn’t cutting it—especially when it came to managing passenger buy-down behavior and uncovering new revenue opportunities.
With PROS Revenue Management Advantage (RMA) with Elasticity Forecasting, Porter made the shift to a smarter, behavior-based model. The result? A more integrated, data-driven approach that reflects how passengers actually shop, reducing reliance on manual workarounds and empowering analysts to focus on macro trends and strategic growth.
In this customer spotlight, Tony Tran, Director, Revenue Management Systems at Porter Airlines, shares how RMA with Elasticity Forecasting is streamlining operations, boosting system trust, and driving better forecasting. He also previews what’s next: leveraging Real-Time Dynamic Pricing (RTDP) to bring even more precision and predictability to Porter’s revenue strategy.
Video Highlights:
- 0:36 – What cemented Porter’s decision to move to Elasticity Forecasting?
- 1:54 – What is Porter Airlines looking forward to with the adoption of RMA and Elasticity Forecasting
- 2:30 – How does the implementation of RMA Elasticity Forecasting compare to when Porter implemented RME+?
- 3:41 – What types of functionalities does Porter look forward to in the usage of RTDP Add-On?
Full Transcript
So my name is Tony Tran. I’m the, director of revenue management systems at Porter. You know, we we deal with all of the systems issues for revenue, build a lot of processes, work with forecasting models optimization, directly work with PROS on their RME system today and work through an RMA implementation, at Porter Airlines. It’s a Toronto headquartered airline. We started off two thousand six as a regional airline and, since expanded across all of, Canada and a lot of the US.
So buy down behavior on passengers is something we definitely have to deal with within our RV even. We’ve had a lot of management strategies deal with buy down. We’ve built processes outside of the system even to try to handle that. And it’s something that, you know, we see a lot of value in trying to bring our fares up where we can. When we saw that willingness to pay was in our MA, we saw the benefits, we spoke to other, airlines who were using it and saw the benefits that they saw with it. Well, that really sort of was a big deal for us in saying that this is gonna really help us drive really good revenue.
With RFA and willingness to pay, we know that there’s all that inside the system fully integrated. We don’t need to go and look at it outside of the system. Having that there is is a big benefit so that the system knows what’s going on. We’re not manipulating.
We’re not doing things outside of the system and really trying to fight the system. Really working and integrating with it was a big, big deal for us. The willingness to pay models that PROS uses is a lot more sophisticated. It’s using a lot better data than we are.
And so what we can build outside, we don’t really trust it as much. And so why not use, you know, a better system that can really make use of it?
I think that there’s gonna be a a big mindset shift for the analysts.
Today, you know, with the traditional forecast model, they’re really trying to look at the weeds. They’re really looking at fine tuning class based demand, trying to move demand here and there, increase it one class at a time, and we know that that’s not how passengers really behave. There’s these sort of bigger trends that we wanna accomplish, and, you know, a lot of their time is gonna be built around understanding how those passengers really behave at a really, you know, more true to what the passengers are really behaving like.
We’ve gained a lot of experience and knowledge going through the RME implementation and now into the RMA implementation.
There’s there’s been a big benefit of having Dashboard go through RME, once. And, you know, obviously, every implementation is gonna run into some hurdles. We ran into a couple of small hiccups, and, you know, through that experience, we know what we should expect on our side. We know, you know, how we can trust PROS, who to go to.
That confidence with PROS, team members has been a a big one. You know, I know that when we run into a problem where we’re gonna get to, or at least how they’re gonna resolve that fairly quickly and on time. So with all of that sort of in mind, we’ve been able to really quickly move forward and progress and really have a smooth invitation to RMA so far, and it’s been it’s been great. Now, really, as I mentioned, having these analysts on our side really look at our passage behaviors, in a more macro sort of trend style is is gonna be big. Really getting them to think about their flights in in a in a quite a different way, that’s gonna be, you know, a big game changer for us.
Obviously, the revenue. We’re we’re all in here to make more revenue, so I’m expecting, you know, some some big big gains there. I think that we can all expect that, and we’re we’re seeing some good results so far from what we can see in the data. I mean, we’re fairly early on implementation, but so far, it’s it’s been pretty good.
On top of that, I think that there’s big benefits on just having that, you know, integration, as I said. And with the system, we’re not fighting the system, adding things on top of it, outside of it to try to combat this buy down. Being able to step aside and say, hey, let’s just use a single system to do all of that. That’s gonna be a big win for us.
