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How Turkish Airlines Improves Group Sales Strategy with PROS GSO Solution

In this video Sinan Uğur, Revenue Management Group Supervisor at Turkish Airlines, walks through the challenges Turkish Airlines successfully solved with PROS Group Sales Optimizer (GSO) solution and the benefits it brought to the carrier’s group sales strategy.

Video Highlights:

  • 00:10 – Turkish Airlines on how PROS GSO solution helped the airline transition to dynamic pricing.
  • 01:03 – The three major challenges the carrier addressed for group sales.
  • 02:53 – How PROS Group Sales Optimizer solution is helping Turkish Airlines improve their group sales strategy.
  • 04:28 – The key outcomes of implementing PROS Group Sales Solution.
  • 05:45 – Learn what is behind the success of the partnership between PROS and Turkish Airlines.

Full Transcript

Question: What PROS solutions is Turkish Airlines using today and what key projects does PROS support?

Sinan Uğur: We are using Group Sales Optimizer Advantage. This solution offers us dynamic pricing, competitive price levels, and instant reply in revenue management. As a group department, we are the first department who use dynamic pricing. It was really exciting to see what will happen when we transition to dynamic pricing. Before dynamic pricing, as you know, we use fare levels, class fare levels. Sometimes there were many huge gaps between two fare levels. With dynamic pricing we can offer any fare level without restricting class fare levels. That help us....

Question: What major challenges is PROS Group Sales Optimizer (GSO) solution helping you address?

Sinan Uğur: I can say there were three major challenges. One is a manual evaluation. Any single group request was evaluated manually and that takes too much time. Second one is late reply because of the manual evaluation and while evaluating a group analyst look at into many parameters and availability and bid price and that took too much time and consequences with late reply. And lastly, we have restricted tools. We don't have any parameters on a system level. Even if we want to take an action on system level, we don't have that ability. Thanks to GSO we overcome of many challenges. Now we currently have various tools on GSO, we have many capabilities. We can take many actions on system level. Let's say for example on a market base or O&D base or any dimension base, we can take action on a system might, that is very nice. Secondly, we reduce our manual evaluation time significantly because before GSO agency or sales office should wait one day or two days to get reply, but currently they can go into GSO even in their mobile and see all the options and that leads to customer satisfaction increase, later by is no longer the case. I can say that before and after the GSO are like two different worlds.

Question: How is PROS GSO helping Turkish Airlines’ sales strategy?

Sinan Uğur: In RM, we are using PROS products. RM, RTDP, GSO is connected with other products. Before GSO, we were using GRMS. That one also is PROS product. I can say that PROS is an important partner for us and GSO now has a key role at our group strategy. With offering a competitive and dynamic event and instant prices. We are using less than one year GSO, and we face many good things. We increased our request, total requests, we significantly reduced our total evaluation time. Change management process is ongoing. Our agencies and sale offices should more adapt to big change. We also need some tailor-made solutions from PROS because as you know, we are, the airline flies to the most of the countries in the world and we have very different markets, very different needs and thankfully PROS often provides us tailor-made solutions and I believe that we will continue to decrease manual evaluation and use GSO full potential.
Question: What outcomes have you witnessed and why do they matter to Turkish Airlines?

Sinan Uğur: I can say there are two main outcomes. First of all, after GSO, our response time significantly improved. In this dynamic world, you can't wait a customer one day or two, they need instant reply. And thanks to GSO we can offer instant reply with all options. Second one, our total request significantly increased. That is very important for us because our total reachable demand has increased. Be open agencies to GSO day by day its number are growing. I can give you some examples. For some region there are many agencies use GSO. We observed that total request and also - group bookings have increased. We are planning to open more agencies, incoming base. That is our plan. After opening more agencies, we know that customer satisfaction will increase and we have more demands and we successfully, we manage our demand.

Question: What is behind the successful partnership of PROS and Turkish Airlines?

Sinan Uğur: As I said before, we have many destinations. We have different markets. The success of our partnership is behind a deep understanding of our unique needs by PROS and PROS offering us tailor-made solutions. I can summarize like that. We made many significant improvements on our systems, our solutions. We have successful transitions from GRMS to GSO Advantage and now we are working with PROS on GSO-U. I believe with PROS support and our close collaboration, GSO-U will be a successful project.