Japan Airlines Boosts Group Sales Revenue 3X With PROS

“We have expanded PROS Group Sales Optimizer to 30 countries and over 2,000 travel agency users are using JAL GSO worldwide. We are aiming to roll it out to even more countries and agencies.”

Airi Go Global Sales Project Team Assistant Manager

Japan Airlines (JAL) is one of the largest carriers in the world, connecting more than 395 airports in 68 countries, including codeshare flights, as of March 31, 2025. JAL first partnered with PROS over a decade ago to support its vision to become the world’s most preferred and valued carrier by improving revenue management and enhancing the customer experience. Building on this success, JAL once again turned to PROS in 2020, this time targeting its group business. The goal: streamline business processes and dramatically reduce manual workload so the sales team can spend more time building relationships with agencies.

Challenges

Like many airlines, JAL relied on the traditional way of booking group travel, which is surprisingly cumbersome. Once JAL received a request, there were several back-and-forth interactions between parties to reach a mutual agreement on flights and pricing. With no standardized way to issue group prices, JAL had to route requests through multiple internal departments, including the revenue management team. Because the process was so involved and included multiple stakeholders, it could take 48 hours to a week to get a quote back for the group request. This resulted in lost opportunities and revenue. Furthermore, the lack of pricing accuracy didn’t account for forecasting or load factor—requiring substantial operational costs.

In the past, most airlines looked at groups as just a way to fill planes. But this mindset is changing as many airlines, like JAL, realize they can leverage efficiency and optimization by automating the process and strategizing group sales just like they do for individual passengers.

Hello PROS

JAL turned to PROS Group Sales Optimizer (GSO) solution to streamline sales, increase group bookings, and boost revenue. PROS GSO is designed to remove the guesswork, using dynamic pricing to set better fares, win more group bookings, and maximize revenue. And the entire booking process is automated—from quote to ticketing—so JAL can manage pricing, contracts, and policies in one place while delivering real-time, high-value quotes.

With PROS Group Sales Optimizer, JAL has the advanced capabilities they need to efficiently manage group travel:

• Automated quoting and booking—Now they have seamless automated quoting and booking of group travel between travel agencies and airlines. Travel agencies have direct access to the GSO self-serving portal which allows them to create a group request and input all the information tied to the group.
• Effortless contract management—GSO automatically creates booking contracts and manages changes throughout the booking lifecycle, helping ensure accuracy and efficiency.
• Dynamic pricing—Dynamic pricing algorithms determine the average marginal cost and the marginal revenue curve of group seats, which contributes to better fares, higher group conversion rates, and increased revenue.
• Efficient group booking management—They can increase, decrease, split, cancel, and edit itineraries as needed.
• Advanced reporting tools—This function gives the JAL team valuable insights for better understanding offers and group bookings.
• Group policy management—This tool ensures adherence to booking policies for a streamlined approach between sales and revenue management teams.

Incorporating Other Airline (OAL) Functionality

JAL achieved such remarkable success in improving efficiency within their own flights that, as a next step, the airline aimed to extend these benefits beyond their network to include partner airlines.

“We wanted to reduce the manual effort beyond just JAL flights,” says Yumi Masumoto, Travel Agency Sales Department, International Group Desk Manager at Japan Airlines.

Working closely with PROS, they incorporated other airline (OAL) functionality into GSO to automate manual tasks and enable dynamic pricing for their partner airlines.

“With PROS Group Sales Optimizer, we have successfully automated our pricing and booking processes, which has resulted in a remarkable 90% reduction in total manual tasks. Thanks to OAL functionality, the workload at the group desk has significantly decreased. It allowed us to reallocate personnel to other high-priority tasks, such as supporting priority guests, assisting disrupted flights, and so on.”

Yumi Masumoto Travel Agency Sales Department, International Group Desk Manager

Empathy-Driven Change Management

Initially, sales branches were hesitant to enforce GSO usage, and agencies often reverted to manual channels despite access to the GSO tool.

“Each sales region has to deal with many local situations, such as competing with home carriers, business customs, and so on,” says Airi Go, Global Sales Project Team Assistant Manager. “Some agencies kept on contacting our sales branch to do the pricing and booking, even though they had access to GSO.” 

To combat this, the team created a change management approach which focuses on acknowledgment, patience, and relationship-building.

“Whenever a sales branch achieves a good result or makes a positive change, we share this success case with other sales branch staff,” says Airi. “People feel happy when they’re acknowledged, so we sincerely praise the work and their contributions to our group revenue.”

“GSO Has Been the Major Contributor for JAL Group Sales Success”

JAL operates in some of the busiest air routes in the world. With PROS Group Sales Optimizer, they’re able to process more fares and more itineraries faster than any other solution in the market, leading to great success for JAL.

“GSO has been the major contributor for JAL group sales success for the past five years,” says Yumi.

“JAL has expanded PROS GSO with OAL functionality to over 30 countries and 2000+ travel agency users, transforming their group sales,” says Airi. “We are still aiming to roll out GSO to more countries and agencies.”

By automating manual tasks and enabling dynamic pricing with partner airlines, JAL has significantly boosted efficiency and revenue.

Results include:

• Reduced quote turnaround time from 4 days to a few minutes
• Increased group revenue by almost 3X
• Increased market share by almost 20%

By automating key processes and improving consistency, JAL reduced manual workload and supported global scalability. Teams are now more strategic and less reactive, and change has been sustained through strong cross-functional partnerships. 

The Key to Success

Japan Airlines’ global group sales transformation highlights that lasting change depends as much on great tools as on user adoption. With PROS GSO and OAL (other airline) capabilities at the core, success came from pairing automation with thoughtful change management. By investing in internal trust, aligning global teams, and empowering agents, Japan Airlines streamlined processes, reduced complexity, and unlocked the full value of PROS technology.

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