Innovations in Revenue Management
Why is revenue management a must-have and where is the technology headed? Justin Jander, Director of Product Management, sits down with revenue management leaders to discuss where they are investing, the trends they see emerging in the industry, and their thoughts on innovations like Willingness-to-Pay forecasting and optimization to help them become more agile in adapting to market shifts and customer needs.
About the Speakers
Brent Overbeek serves as Senior Vice President - Revenue Managem0ent & Network Planning for Hawaiian Airlines. Prior to this role, he was Vice President - Revenue Management & Network Planning, overseeing the company’s revenue management and revenue analytics, network and schedule planning. As Senior Vice President, he expanded his responsibility to include Hawaiian’s growing cargo division.Previously, Overbeek served as Vice President - Revenue Management for Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi. He also worked for American Airlines, where he gained 19 years of progressive analytical and revenue management experience in several positions including Managing Director - Domestic and Regional Revenue Management as well as Managing Director - Domestic Pricing and Regional Revenue Management. Overbeek holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.\,/p\.
Justin Jander, Director of Product Management at PROS, focuses on the Revenue Management, Availability, and Dynamic Pricing products in airline passenger, airline cargo, and other transportation and logistics industries. He has been with PROS for 11 years, all within the product management group. In product management, Jander is focused on continuous improvement of the products, through new features and functionality that improve the industry-leading Science as well as enhancements to the way analysts use the system. In order to understand the needs of the always-changing industry, he has worked with customers across the world, which allows him to understand the business problem and translate that into features that can improve the products. Jander earned a B.S. in Mathematics from Stephen F. Austin State University and a M.S. degree in Statistical Science from Southern Methodist University.
Suriyati Nordin, Head of Inventory & Pricing at Malaysia Airlines, is a strategic and analytical revenue management expert with over 15 years experience. Nordin possess strong theoretical and practical understanding of the industry with proven performance improvement capability. Nordin is an effective revenue management specialist who delivers an assigned revenue budget, achieves key performance indicators and ensures best practices and performance.
Yuli Thompson, SVP Revenue Management, Distribution & Holidays at Virgin Atlantic, is an experienced business leader with a demonstrated history of working in the airlines and aviation industry. She has 15 years of solid commercial and financial background in areas as diverse as Sales Distribution, Fleet Planning and Revenue Management. Thompson is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. She previously was based in London and Singapore with exposure to working with different cultures through the Alliances portfolio and being embedded in a strong US joint venture relationship.
Full Transcrip
Justin Jander: Hi, everyone, and welcome to our panel discussion on Revenue Management at Outperform 2021. My name is Justin Jander. I'm a Director of Product Management here at PROS for our Revenue Management product, and I'm joined today by some great colleagues from around the globe who have joined us to talk about their journey through Revenue Management. Each of the airlines represented here today have made decisions to change and take on new technology for the Revenue Management department. So we're going to talk to them about those decisions, as well as some short term and long term innovations that they're working on within their teams. So I think just to get us started. I'd like to have the team introduce themselves. So Yuli if you can start off by telling us who you are, your background in RM, your background in the airline industry and your current role in the Virgin Atlantic....
Yuli Thompson: Fantastic thank you, Justin, for that. So firstly, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. We are on a global panel, so this is very representative of the time zones. We are in at the moment. My name is Yuli Thompson. I'm currently the SVP for Revenue Management, Distribution and Holidays at Virgin Atlantic, it’s quite a mouthful. I come to that in a bit. But essentially, I've had about almost 20 years in the airline industry. I started off at Singapore Airlines based in Singapore, looking at investor relations and fleet planning move to Virgin Atlantic, maybe about 15 years ago. And in my career had covered distribution, alliances, international sales, and also pricing and Revenue Management. And in my current role, I've got responsibility for that, but also the distribution and payments team globally, as well as we have a holiday business selling package holidays from the UK to premium leisure destination, and I've got that as well. So that's a little bit about me.
Justin Jander: Great yeah, thank you very much and thanks for joining us today. Suriyati, what can you tell us a little bit about your role at Malaysia Airlines and your journey through up to the RM department?
Suriyati Nordin: All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Suriyati Nordin. I am leading the Revenue Management team in Malaysia Airlines right now. I joined the company as a pricing specialist and has advanced progressively to more responsible positions within Revenue Management. With over 50 years of Revenue Management experience, I have work across different units that includes pricing, inventory partnership and have also been involved with various Revenue Management initiative projects and also system enhancement. I was one of the subject matter expert when Malaysia Airlines decided to move to PROS a decade ago, and I play an important role in championing Malaysia Airlines go live decision with a willingness to pay implementation recently. It is really an honor to be part of the Outperform panel today to speak about innovations in Revenue Management. I would like to thank Justin and PROS team for giving me this opportunity. Thank you.
Justin Jander: Well, thank you, but thank you very much for your time today. And we appreciate you joining and Brent to wrap us up. Can you tell us about your role at Hawaiian airlines?
Brent Overbeek: Yeah great. Thanks, Justin. It's wonderful to be here with you all today or tomorrow. In some cases, it is. I'm Brent Overbeek. I'm the senior vice president of revenue management, network planning and cargo here at Hawaiian Airlines. My journey in RN began gosh, almost. I think we're approaching 30 years, so I spent about 20 years at American Airlines starting in Revenue Management in a variety of roles there. Left American spent a couple of years in the Middle East running the Revenue Management practice at Etihad Airways and then came to Hawaiian a little over seven years ago and started off having Revenue Management and network planning and have since picked up cargo as well. So wonderful to be here today.
Justin Jander: Yes and again, thank you very much and thanks to all the panelists. We appreciate it. And looking forward to the conversation, I think it's going to be a great discussion. And so let's kick things off. I think know, as each of you talked about, there's a lot of opportunity that each of you have taken on recently to for new technology to solve your own business problems. And so I think it'd be great to hear about the process that you went through to make those decisions, how you evaluated the options, challenges you may have faced during the implementation, or are facing now and along with some of the expected benefits. And so I guess Suriyati, let's start with you. You know, the Malaysian airline teams, as you mentioned, just completed the willingness-to-pay migration with PROS. Could you tell us a little bit about what motivated your step into willingness-to-pay?
Suriyati Nordin: All right, sure. For Malaysia airlines, right we operate in a highly competitive environment with a continuous challenge from the increasing numbers of low cost carriers buy down and also evolving passengers. The demands are real challenges for Malaysia Airlines that we need to continually overcome. We feel it is actually crucial for us to continue looking for innovative solutions to optimize our business processes and most importantly, to capitalize on revenue opportunities. So with the collaboration with PROS, we decided that we could leverage on willingness to pay to give us greater ability to understand customer pricing sensitivity. So Malaysia Airlines is actually the first airline to implement WTP capabilities as part of our overall revenue optimization strategy. The aim is actually with WTP is for us to overcome the biodome challenges in pricable demand market by utilizing the power of AI and pricing science to improve our demand forecasting and inventory management in driving our speed and also efficiency.
Justin Jander: Great, I think that's such a great understanding of the situation there and giving us a good picture of what's going on at Malaysia Airlines and why you took on the willingness to pay capabilities. So as you mentioned, it's ya know, you're just completed the implementation. Can you tell us a little bit about what sort of challenges you faced from the implementation side, whether they be from the business side or otherwise? What sort of challenges did you face during the implementation of WTP?
Suriyati Nordin: Yeah, we did face some challenges. Yeah so there were actually multiple back and forth discussions with PROS during the implementation stage, as this is actually the first WTP project not only for Malaysia airlines, but PROS well. So during the initial stage, our aim was actually to launch willingness to pay for all our markets, both domestic and also international. But due to covid, where most of the international bodies actually closed, we have limited reliable historical data of bookings and prices, which may impact the system to forecast accurately. So with that, we decided to proceed with our domestic market first. But the good news is the lessons we are learning from having WTP on domestic markets will actually help us as we plan to roll out the functionality to the international side. So we see this as a continuous process, as we learn how to interact with the science and ultimately put more markets on WTP.
Justin Jander: Great, and then the last question, just to kind of wrap it all up. What are you hearing about the results so far from the team? Any kind of preliminary results, things you're seeing so far?
Suriyati Nordin: Yes, actually, it's good. All right. So we noticed that WTP is actually effective in handling high yield market, especially nearer to departure, where we are seeing improvement in availability recommendation by the system. So with this, the analyst is not required to perform too many manual intervention. The improvement in process efficiency means our team will have more time to focus on strategy initiatives rather than performing all the transactional tasks. Using WTP has also provided more insight into the market conditions by having access to reports and also data that showed the relationship between price and demand. So with this information, our analysts can actually understand the expected impact on demand by various changes in price, helping them to understand the revenue impact their actions will actually have.
Justin Jander: Wow, yeah, I think that's such a good perspective to hear and really great to hear the success so far with willingness to pay and obviously the potential that it can bring to for your international markets. Well, so Yuli, I think on your side, the team has just completed implementations of RM Advantage, RTDP Advantage and GSO Advantage. Obviously a great achievement for the team. So similar if the question is as what we talked about with Suriyati in Malaysia. But what can you tell us a little bit about the things that drove your decisions to make the decision to move to RM Advantage and RTDP Advantage and GSO? And what sort of criteria did you use to make that decision and what drove the decision making process for you?
Yuli Thompson: Thank you, Justin. I don't know that I'll be able to get into that much detail in the same way. However, I think it'll be fair to say that Virgin Atlantic, maybe we make decisions based on the revenue benefits that we see. So if I tell you a little bit about Virgin Atlantic and my background, that might give a flavor of what's driven us to this decision that that's led to our belief that this would definitely give us revenue benefits. So Virgin Galactic's probably quite unique carrier in a world, most of our traffic is local traffic. So we in the past about 10 years ago, we probably carry about 90% local traffic, and we've grown that by about 10 percentage point now, particularly with our joint venture with Delta that's been in place for about six years. So you can see that we are on a journey and supporting and supporting that. We have been a long standing customer of PROS for about 20 years. We were on a system called P5 that does lake-based demand forecasting, and we have supplemented it with RTDP, which gives us O&D Control. But we are probably one of maybe three or four carriers in the world that uses P5 and RTDP this way. And in the past, when I was looking after the inventory team, we've tried to benchmark best practices with other carriers and we found very, very few other carriers like us. Nonetheless, you know, I myself was aware when I tried to learn PROS to manage London Delhi route, for example, the number of transactional tasks that were actually involved in actually managing getting good inventory control on the route. We felt that we have not really invested adequately in how we've used the system and freed our people up to focus on strategic thinking rather than, in Suriyati’s words, transactional task. And that, for us was a lot of the reason why we went down the route of quite a fundamental upgrade. Now, you know, it's quite a big project. It's like an overhaul of your it's like a heart transplant or most of the Revenue Management system because we were changing P5 to RMA. We were upgrading the version of RTDP that we have. We were putting everything to cloud and then we were changing g five, which was our group's tool to GSO. So it's a pretty fundamental change, and you can be sure that for us, we worked for about 12 months with the PROS team to assess that we would definitely get revenue benefits from it other than productivity increases. This gives us better demand forecasting by owned by O&D, but not only that by point of sale, which for us has been changing over the years, so it gives us better control and better anticipation of what's coming. Also, improved analytics. What used to take us like you, ask for a simple metric on how a flight is performing. Data analyst needing to download reports. You know, sort of format those reports in Excel before it gives the management insight. Now it's just at a click of a hand and it's like a click of a button on the interface. So for us, it was a little bit of a no brainer. And we know that with better demand forecasting as well as O&D and point of sale control, then that definitely gives us the revenue benefits that we're very much looking forward to that in the months to come. It's quite new for us. So both RMA and RTDP was just implemented in July. GSO was just went live last month. So, you know, you're going to ask me about early results and things like that. And I would say it's early days also because demand is relatively low at the moment, the UK market, and I'll come on to it in a little bit, maybe about the US reopening up, which is a significant milestone for us. And because of that, the sort of projections that we have anticipated in a normal year would be moderated by the existing environment.
Justin Jander: Great, well, yeah, you jumped and ahead and answered that last question, and certainly understandable, and I think that that's, you know, obviously as your team continues to use the system, there'll be more opportunities to get that feedback and see how they're using it and those sorts of things. So yeah, thank you very much. I'm glad to hear the implementation, as you mentioned, just completed on the GSO side just about a month ago. So that's obviously very exciting. So Thanks for that. Brent, we'll follow it up with you. Obviously, your team is right in the implementation stage. And you know, Hawaiian Airlines has been one that PROS has certainly wanted to have for a while, and we're really excited to have Hawaiian joining the PROS family. Of course, you know, the question really is why now, what drove Hawaiian Airlines to make the decision now and what sort of things did you use to evaluate that decision?
Brent Overbeek: Sure thanks, Justin. It has been a long journey for us and we've been interested in PROS for at least the seven years I've been here and talking to the team at least a few years before that. And really, this time, we were looking to move. We frankly, the technology where we were using was kind of end of life and we knew we needed a refresh. And so we took it out to market, went through a full RFP, spent a lot of time with our data science team kind of looking at forecast accuracy and doing a lot of simulations. I think some of them might have driven some of your colleagues at PROS a little bit crazy as we work through the process, but quite diligent as we were thinking about it because we really, you know, similar to my colleagues here on the panel, we've got a really unique business model and that we've got a part of our business that is high frequency, high density. So, you know, pre-pandemic we'd run 30 trips a day between Honolulu and Maui and that having a lot of fluctuation time of day, day of week, traffic composition, very, very different throughout the day. And then we've got a long-haul network that is disproportionately point to point similar to what Yuli was mentioning, mostly point to point with some connectivity within the islands and then a little bit of long haul to long haul connectivity. So as we were looking through and evaluating our options, we really needed to make sure that we were getting the accuracy for the long haul traffic on relatively low frequency markets. But we were also able to handle all the unique and nuances associated with our neighbor island flying. And so as we work through PROS, did a great job. I would, I would say, kind of came out. We had some concerns over some stuff on that we were seeing on some of the neighbor island results and we worked with the team to understand some of that. The PROS team was great about helping us identify some of that and how we could solve for that going forward.
Justin Jander: Great, yeah, and yeah, obviously, again, happy to have worked through those things and gotten to where we are today, and that's during the implementation. And so obviously, you know, you may not have experienced the challenges yet, and hopefully there aren't so many challenges and the lessons learned from the others here help resolve some of those. But anything that you've heard so far, anything you've heard from Yuli on what they went through, anything that you're hearing kind of preliminarily on the challenges that you might face and things that you're thinking about as you're going through the implementation?
Brent Overbeek: Yeah well, first of all, I'm going to be in London in a couple of weeks. I think I may need to go buy Yuli a beer and get the full download about. You're welcome anytime Brent. All right. All right. No, I think it's an interesting time to implement new technology. And certainly if I look at where we're at in the marketplace, a lot of unique characteristics that some of my colleagues here already hit on. You know, our market has been more open than others. Certainly the domestic side of our market came back this year, quite strong. Frankly, by July, we were back to a larger North America network than we had pre-pandemic and load factors kind of back where they historically had been. But that's been flowed throughout the pandemic. You know, we're coming out of a period now with the Delta variant, we're bookings have slowed down, but now they're picking back up. So, you know, really, our history is not great. We're kind of grappling with that. We've had some fare structure changes. We've had some pretty serious competitive changes in industry capacity. Not unsurprisingly, in a leisure market is up quite a bit right now, and we've had a lot more pricing volatility and use of the bottom part of the fare structure than I would say we historically have. So you combine all of that with a big technology project. We've got a lot of work ahead of us together with the PROS team. And those are the kinds of things that will be keeping a keen eye on as we look forward to implementing early next year.
Justin Jander: Great Yeah. And obviously, yeah, a lot to it and a lot of things that, like you said, the technology piece itself is a big undertaking. And then doing it during COVID has it's presents its own challenges too.
Brent Overbeek: Yeah, I guess, a couple of other things I missed. One is kind of business process revamping. I think Yuli talked about that. I think that is something we're really, really focused on. We've got to frankly, both curiosity and you mentioned, we've got unlock value and make better use of our analysts time and getting out of this transactional low value transactions and be able to get up to a higher level impact. Things that a broader level where they need to be impacted and understand that, I think, is something we're really keen to do. But that's also a big business process transformation for us and recognizing that, you know, taking the team along with us as we manage that, I think is going to be really important and something that our team is really focused on. And the other piece, frankly, I think Yuli probably dealt with this a lot was going through this in a remote fashion. So usually you go through an implementation, you've got people on site, you know, you can look in their eyes and kind of assess what's going on there. And it's different. And I think we've made the best that we can out of the technology. But I think overall, things are going well
Yuli Thompson: If I might add to what Brent said , Justin. I think, you know, I didn't even touch on it because we took it for granted to Brent's point, that we are in a virtual environment now. When we first looked at implementing the upgrade for RMA and RTDP, for example, it was going to be a 12 month project and we shortened it to a nine month implementation. The thinking was we wanted to get it in before summer so that we can maximize the value that we would get from the system. And we did the entire implementation virtually. And I, you know, in a normal world, we would never even have envisaged doing something like that. You would have at least one face to face meeting, particularly between technology teams. But I would say we've had tremendous support from the PROS team. And actually, even though everything was conducted online, the support was phenomenal, as well as the level of interaction and responsiveness of the team and where we had to address certain things on a very critical time frame. We've always found we were able to escalate that and get things addressed very quickly. You know, we didn't even mention it because this is our new way of working. However, that's a pretty significant step forward in a new world, about how the new world will actually operate, and I'm under no illusion, so covid is both, I mean, nobody would say we wish this upon an airline industry and international travel is probably one of the last sectors to recover. Virgin Atlantic is a long haul international carrier. We've got no domestic operations to boost our ways of working with demand. But it's both an opportunity as well, though, because if you think about it, something like making a change to O&D management on the system during normal times, everyone would warn us that this is such a risky undertaking, and it's such a big change for our analysts to manage demand on an O&D level, as well as manage different aspects of the flight on the flight level. And you know, that's a big transformation in terms of how our people work. I would say the revenue risks are relatively low during covid, which gives us a freedom to try things and to do the things differently in a way that is a lot less risky than a normal world.
Justin Jander: I think this is a great segue into the next question. So I think, you know, when we don't want to focus on COVID itself, right? We talked about it. It's bad for the industry, but there was an opportunity to kind of think about, you know, what sort of innovations have you been able to take on during this time? So things that, you know, because of covid, you may not have done it if it wasn't during these times, but because of covid, you've been able to kind of reinvest into certain areas. What sort of things have you done in that way? So Yuli, let's start with you. What things have Virgin Atlantic taken on that without covid, you wouldn't have necessarily done?
Yuli Thompson: Right so I would say that for us, we're not really out of it yet. And fundamentally, for us, the last decision point was actually announced just last week, you know, with the US saying giving a certainty to the date when the US would reopen to foreign nationals visiting the country. Because you know, the way we put it is Virgin Atlantic will not be Virgin Atlantic. There's no Virgin without the Atlantic. 70% of our network used to be flying to the u.s., and now it's almost skewed the other way. So during COVID itself, the biggest innovation is actually managing this change throughout the RMA, as well as RTPD and GSO upgrade is a pretty significant project from our perspective. Nonetheless, I think outside of that, we've had the freedom or we felt the freedom to trial new approaches to stimulate demand because to my point, earlier revenue risks are relatively low during this entire last 18 months or so, and we felt the freedom to try pricing things in a different way, structuring our prices in a different way. So we restructured some of our pricing of the US and we're trialing different things in the UK. But basically we felt the freedom to try new ways to offer products to the market, to our customers and different ways of pricing it, as well as different ways of combining products.
Justin Jander: Great yeah, I think that's really interesting and that's exactly the kind of thing that again, you know, COVID obviously isn't a good thing, but those are the kinds of opportunities that it presents and allows you to trial and error and trial and error new things. Brent, similar same question to you. What kind of things is Hawaiian done along those lines?
Brent Overbeek: Yeah, I mean, obviously, our work with you guys has been a big, a big piece of work over the last little while. But kind of beyond that, we really spent a lot of time focusing on data early on, and it was really kind of a, I call it, a data cleanse. We had our data warehousing wasn't where it kind of needed to be. And the amount of work it took sometimes to answer a relatively simple question wasn't where it needed to be. So we spent a lot of time and we're starting to working on that and we're starting to bear some of the fruit from that, which is really nice in terms of going back to what we talked about earlier about analysts empowerment and helping them be more successful, what they do and less tactical and how they're managing some of their markets. So we spent a lot of time, effort and frankly, money on that, and that's really reaped a lot of benefits. Similar to Yuli, we did a lot of kind of pricing cleanup and pricing experimentation. So for us, we spent a lot of time focusing on kind of partner markets, some offline markets, things we weren't getting to, but that were worth a look, as well as then spending a lot of time doing some experimentation in some of our own markets. And so both on the price side inventory strategy side as well as probably the last piece where we spent a lot of time and effort was really accelerating some progress that we were doing on better kind of price optimization around ancillary products. And that is an area where we were probably a little behind, where we wanted to, where we wanted to be. And as it's grown to be a bigger and bigger portion of our overall revenue stream and certainly of our profit portfolio, we really wanted to invest the ability to more differentiate on price and product there for some of our ancillaries. And so we spent a lot of time and effort there and again are starting to see some of that bleed out in the marketplace now.
Justin Jander: Great, Yeah. Again, you know, I think it really speaks to the things you need to do during a time like this to be able to kind of come out on the other side and have these processes cleaned up when things maybe you had an opportunity to kind of maybe a little bit more downtime, but giving you some things to do during that so that when you come out of it, it's a little bit better on that side. Suriyati on your side? Same question. What sort of things have you done around during the COVID period?
Suriyati Nordin: All right. We believe in the importance of business innovation as a significant aspect of differentiation among market players. So one of the innovations we did that definitely will continue post-covid is when we move our economy fare structure from vertical to horizontal branded vests with the focus in giving passengers a greater option to choose from. So what we did is we enhanced our product offerings to center around flexibility and also confidence to travel. So with economy, with economy, horizontal brand advance, our highest brand offers priority services like baggage check in as well as priority boarding. As you know, these attributes are normally given to business class passengers only. We innovate, so our customer passengers, our economy passengers are able to enjoy these books by paying just a little bit more. Our economy highest paid brand also offers unlimited date change, passengers can make as many changes as he or she wants without having to pay any fee. Yeah, so this reaffirms our commitment in prioritizing our customer, especially during these times of uncertainty as customer is our center of gravity. So in addition to that innovation for our business, we also plan to take on a more tactical improvement as well. We will be upgrading our PROS RM Advantage to 5.55, where we will have more workflow capabilities that provide better insight into the analyst market. So our analyst will be able to personalize their workflows, which will make their work more efficient. So this upgrade will also include new alerting capabilities, which is actually a good innovation for analyst reference in decision making. Also, to add another one Justin, with the recent WTP implementation for our domestic network, as I mentioned earlier, as we learn more about the way it works and the impact that it has, there is actually the opportunity to start broadening the use of it to our regional and also long haul international markets as well.
Justin Jander: Great, yeah, I think your point on the screens, the reporting pieces that are coming in the system really relate to what Yuli mentioned before about the things that they're already seeing, the ability to kind of have access to those reports. And I think those are things that as the users and analysts become more accustomed to that, their efficiencies become better. And I think all of you have used the term now of that transactional type of activity versus more strategic thinking. And I think that's a really good way of describing it and those types of reports really help there. All right. So to close things out, I've got a very broad question for all three of you. And it's what do you what do you think the future looks like? And of course, if I had asked this in November of 2019, I'm guessing no one would have guessed, you know, international pandemic would be what we would say. But given that we can't predict the future, but I think we want to look forward, what are we looking at ahead for the Revenue Management side? What are the nopportunities that we have in front of us? So Suriyati, let's start with you. What do you see as the big innovations for the long term in the Revenue Management space
Suriyati Nordin: For Malaysia airlines, right as you all know, Malaysia Airlines being the first adopter of WTP capability actually gives us a great head start to its dynamic pricing. So based on our market landscape, we operate in an environment with a lot of price variations and also price changes. So we are considering in automating this with what the industry called it as dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing will actually give us more flexibility in the price that we can charge, which opens the door for more revenue opportunity when we don't have to rely on just the fair classes. Yeah, so as our team becomes more comfortable with WTP and understanding the relationship between price and demand, it will open the door to more personalized or customer aware pricing. Meaning that we know the attributes of the passenger and we can actually adjust the price based on specific conditions at the time off request. WTP has actually set the stage for this dynamic pricing as it creates the framework of a continuous price demand relationship for a particular product, rather than just relying on the class code only. So based on the vision the industry has for dynamic pricing, we feel that Malaysia Airlines is positioned well to continue innovating along this path to get to the goal of dynamic pricing.
Justin Jander: Well, I certainly love that. I mean, the idea of getting to a fair class free world is one that I think we can all relate to and one that, you know, is a great goal for us to have as an industry. So so certainly can appreciate the things you just mentioned there because they really set us up to take on the next step in Revenue Management. So thank you very much for that. Yuli, what would you add from your side about the direction where we're headed?
Yuli Thompson: In a way, I don't have a lot more to add to what Suriyati has said, and when I reflect on this, the things I'm about to say are things that for those of us in the Revenue Management space. We've been talking about and thinking about for quite a number of years because they're not easy questions to answer. So putting in dynamic pricing or automating the way you file fast or make decisions on what fairs you decide to file and then putting in price points between courses, which is dynamic pricing, all that is intriguing. We are looking at we are also trialing and looking at demand elasticity. Not quite with respect to the customers, but also with respect to the competitors pricing. That's an interesting trial that we're running at the moment, so we'll see what comes out of that. But I think for me, with something like dynamic pricing, one of the questions we haven't quite resolved is what we do for partner, partner operated flights. The JV has been such a fundamental part of Virgin Atlantic and very important to us that we 2e give a considered and joined up offer to the customer in the market so that when the customer receives it, it's consistent across the JV and this is very important, particularly for the corporate market. We haven't quite solved the problem of how we control the offer when it's dynamic pricing. It works best in direct channel and if it's only on your own airline, but not across airlines and for something like transatlantic, where we've got JVs with partners like Delta, Air France, KLM, that is a problem that we are working on solving because that's going to be very, very important for our joint customers. So I think if we can make progress on that in the next 12 months in this space, I would be very, very happy. Then the other things that are on my mind are things like how do we consider the value of a customer, not just from the price of a flight component itself? Increasingly, they're thinking about other components that a customer would want to access, and we want to increase the attachment rate for each one of those customers. But at the moment, our upgraded and very good system is very good, but it still just considers mainly the flight element of it. And we are in some discussions about how we expand that more widely to take into consideration the value of the entire journey, not just the flight component, as well as linking in with our CRM system so that we think about the lifetime value of a customer. But those are not. Like, I wouldn't think I wouldn't say that those are innovations that I've just thought of on my teams just solo because actually a lot of the cutting edge is with the team, not with myself. And I'm very grateful for that. These are big problems that we've been trying to solve for many years, and it might take multiple minds to come together to try and get resolution to do what's best for our customers, really. Ultimately, because ultimately it's about giving the right offer at the right time to the right customers and one that is consistent across partner carriers.
Justin Jander: And I think you really hit the nail on the head there with with, you know, the idea, the concept of, of course, you know, dynamic pricing sounds really good, right? It's dynamic pricing. But as you mentioned, it's really easy to solve for the direct channel. Point to point markets all on your mettle. But at the moment, you start expanding out to a lot of the different components. It does become much more complicated. Brent, can you wrap us up with your vision for where you think we're headed as an industry on the Revenue Management space?
Brent Overbeek: Sure I think a lot of the same thoughts as my esteemed colleagues here, I think kind of offer management and how we put the right offer at the right time in front of the guests in the right channel. And doing that more broadly, I think that will continue to evolve and frankly accelerate in the next couple of years. I think kind of two, a couple of things that haven't been hit on that maybe a little more. Uh, a little different thoughts is really around we're not going to have a straight path to recovery, we've seen that here in Hawaii. And so the ability of revenue managers to adapt and change and be flexible and systems to be able to do that is going to be really important. It's always important, but it's going to be more important than ever. And I think we've seen that in Hawaii and we see it in the US and that's going to happen in international markets. We’re going to have a step forward, a step back, a step sideways. And being able to maneuver in that is something that isn't a skill set we've traditionally needed to use. And so I think that is something we'll need to kind of harness and focus on. Hopefully it goes away and hopefully, you know, we don't have to worry about it 12 to 18 months from now, but it is going to be something that I think in the interim is going to be important to all three of us here on the panel. And probably the last thing I think is that I'm curious I don't have a defined answer of how we get there is, you know, I think we haven't, we still have a lot of ability to harness data and to understand things outside of traditional RM systems of how do we move forward with that? And, you know, taking our cues from places other than just to our historical booking information and current intakes. I think there's a lot more out there that given the size of computing today, that will be interesting to evolve and explore in the months and years ahead.
Justin Jander: Well, great, yeah, and I think, you know, you're right, and you said it, Brent and Yuli, you also said it as well. But you know, when we think about, you know, we do have to solve this collectively as an industry, and that means airlines and partners like PROS. And I think those are the opportunities. We have these types of sessions where the conversation gets started and that we can motivate conversations amongst the industry to figure out how to solve the more complex parts of the problem. So I think that's a great way to kind of conclude things today because obviously hearing where we have to go is really exciting. And I appreciate each of you today, taking the time to give us an overview of what you've been through so far and where you're looking to go and what the things your teams are doing right now. So really, we appreciate it. To our audience, those of you, if you happen to have any questions for the team. Feel free to reach out to these folks on LinkedIn. They're all out there. So happy to answer your questions. I'm sure if you have any and feel free to reach out to me as well should you have any questions for me. And we're happy to continue the conversation after the panel is over here. So with that again, thank you very much to all three of you for joining us today, and we really appreciate your time. And yeah, thank you all.