Commercial Autonomy: Roadmap to Retail Transformation
It is a transformational time for the airline industry as it transitions to modern airline retailing through Offers and Orders. To do so successfully, airlines need to let go of their legacy past and gain full commercial autonomy. It’s time to rethink the commercial organization, redesign an AI-powered retail IT ecosystem and reengage in open and winning partnerships. Surain Adyanthaya, President of Travel at PROS defines the roadmap to commercial autonomy, powered by Offer Optimization, Offer Creation and Next-Generation Order Management.
Full Transcript
Emcee: Good afternoon, please welcome President Travel at PROS, Surain Adyanthaya.
Surain Adyanthaya: Good afternoon. I'm really excited today to talk to you about the future and where we see things going. Specifically commercial autonomy, how airlines are going to take back control of their product and offer and what's the roadmap to get there.
Surain Adyanthaya: We've all seen that over the last few years. We had covid, but now we're back. The airline industry is very much back. Europe, North America, the America's almost a hundred percent. And Asia, we believe, will be a hundred percent back by the end of this year and next year. So with all of this resurgence and demand, there's an opportunity for us in the airline world to truly capitalize on the high load factors, the high yields that are possible today. And you'll see some of the numbers that IATA has presented. There's a 21.5% revenue increase, 18% capacity increase, and load factors are high. And as we know, high load factors are the key to driving additional revenue in our business. So what is the components of all of this and how is that going to impact the airline industry in the coming years? We believe the future is modern airline retailing, and this is the move to offer and orders for those of you who don't know, offers and orders are now more commonly being referred to as modern airline retailing....
Surain Adyanthaya: And IATA estimates that there's a $40 to $45 billion in value creation that's possible for the airline industry by moving in this direction. It's very substantial. Last year, the total global airline industry had $640 billion in revenue. So you can see that this makes a huge difference in a business where every point matters. And if you equate that to an individual customer on average, IATA estimates there'll be $7 per traveler that can be additionally generated using this new technology stack. So it's an opportunity that no airline should pass up on, and the first movers will get the greatest benefit in our opinion. So let's stay on the topic of ancillary revenue. We believe that ancillary revenue, as we all know ancillary revenues have dramatically increased and become a bigger part of the airline equation. Why? Why is it even more important to double down on it in our opinion?
Surain Adyanthaya: First of all, distribution as direct distribution increases through the adoption of NDC, through direct channels, your website, et cetera, you have more opportunities to offer ancillary revenues in various parts of the traveler journey. Second, the technology for dynamic offer creation. With the emergence of new real time AI, there's now the possibility to create compelling convertible offers that the consumer really wants, and that drives revenue and increases customer satisfaction. And finally, there's the change in the consumer mind, the state of mind, the mindset shift. What is this? Well, historically, the traveler was hesitant to give information to the airline. The new generation of traveler, the millennial traveler, that's driving over 50% of global airline traffic today wants the buyer [seller], the airline to know them. They're the Amazon generation. Their expectation is that you, the airline, know what they've done in the past, what they're interested in, and that you would create a compelling offer that they will purchase.
Surain Adyanthaya: So let's talk about that consumer, this digitally native consumer, they're increasingly on their devices. Six hours and 40 minutes now is the average time on a device by a consumer, and 73% of them expect personalization in their retail shopping online. Furthermore, it's a multi-modal buying process. Over 40% of travel buyers today utilize their mobile devices as part of their, the travel journey. In fact, most of them have over 20 touch points between the time of inspiration and the time of purchase. And these touch points are across various devices. It could be on their phone, it could be on their iPad at home or their laptop at work. And they expected a connected experience where the airline provides all the information consistently across all domains.
Surain Adyanthaya: Here's the big problem we have, Amit Khandelwal of Emirates spoke about it last year. A PSS in the airline world, which is a legacy system, connects to over 400 different legacy systems within an airline infrastructure. So we have these consumer expectations. The consumer wants a modern retailing online experience where we have a backend of huge legacy technology. So we have to overcome that, but we are at the cusp of moving beyond that, which is a very exciting thing because unlocking and getting past legacy products is what really will allow us to create this experience that travelers want.
Surain Adyanthaya: You've heard a lot of talk about AI. What does the consumer think about AI? Well, a recent study that was done by EY says that consumers trust AI more than the retailers who do not use AI. So basically we're seeing signals that consumers not only want AI, they expect AI and they believe the recommendations of AI more than what's traditionally marketed to them. So all of this talk about AI not only increases the opportunity to present the right product, but it presents the opportunity to create more trust with the consumer. So we like to say the age of AI, touch points with AI become trust points.
Surain Adyanthaya: So how do we embrace this, this time of incredible change in the airline industry and how do we utilize it to drive exponential growth? That's the question that we are often asked because generally I think the airline world accepts a lot of what we just said. So we would like to chart a course to commercial autonomy. In the legacy world, airlines did not have commercial autonomy. You did not own your product. Someone else was selling it and you had very little control of the price. You had very little control of how it was offered to the consumer and even the fulfillment of it. So in this modern airline retailing, we get to flip it upside down. Airlines, we believe the future is open ecosystem with modular solutions that allow rapid innovation and having full control of the data of the product, the stock, and the customer in the hands of the airline.
Surain Adyanthaya: So how do you do this? We're entering a new age of AI native platforms. You'll see that when Apple rolls out its new iOS, it's going to be the most revolutionary change probably in the history of iOS because it'll be totally AI native. It'll start AI first with the platform, with all the apps built on top of the data and the AI. You'll see this in the next version of Microsoft's products like Windows, where their PCs will have an AI native operating system with products and operating systems built on top of it. And similarly, we're doing the same with the PROS Platform. You'll see at the bottom an AI native platform with a common data model that spans across all of the touch points and applications that PROS provides. On top of that, we're able to apply many different algorithms and the results of which can be shared across the entire customer experience and journey. So let's start off with offer optimization. Start off with the basics. This is where PROS started, revenue management, getting the price right for the seat. This has evolved incredibly over the years, especially with the new AI algorithms that have come of age. Revenue management today is not your revenue management of yesterday. And we'll talk a little bit more about this. There's real-time dynamic pricing, something that we've been talking about for quite some time and is now widespread applied in around the world generating billions or even trillions of transactions.
Surain Adyanthaya: As you walked up here, you probably saw an LED wall that said, PROS does over 3.4 trillion real-time dynamic pricing transactions in a year. That's more than all the transactions of Visa and MasterCard combined. And then finally, there's the dynamic ancillary pricing, which we'll go deeply into, and then Request-Specific Pricing. What is Request-Specific Pricing? That is knowing your customer and using AI algorithms in real-time to modify your offer, to increase the rate of conversion, and to increase customer satisfaction, as importantly. We'll talk a little bit about that as well. Let's talk about offer creation and retailing. It's not enough to have these underlying technologies for optimizing the price of the seat and optimizing the price of the ancillaries. You have to distribute it effectively in this very diverse world of distribution today. So to address that, we've developed a product stack of shopping and pricing that's incredibly fast. It's very accurate. And most of all, it's designed for modern commerce. It's designed for inspirational websites where you have 50,000 to one look to book ratios and you're able to respond to those in a cost-effective manner.
Surain Adyanthaya: Many airlines that we work with have struggled with this. We've put a tremendous amount of effort in solving this problem. On top of that, of course, we have NDC distribution. NDC has been around for a long time now. It's taken much longer than we expected. But now we're seeing major airlines in the world with 40 plus percent of their tickets sold through direct or NDC channels. And we see this accelerating going forward. So being able to operate in this multi-modal distribution environment is incredibly important. Merchandising and bundling. You have to have a place where you can manage your ancillaries effectively, have a view of the consumption of your products, the pricing, the rules, and be able to bundle them in real-time using AI as well as rules. Because rules and guardrails do have a purpose in all of this. And then finally, digital retailing and IBE. You can create the best offer in the world, but if you don't have an IBE or a digital retailing storefront that can effectively present it to the consumer, you're not going to get the maximum value for that. So we've actually built technology for that as well. Moving along to offer marketing. You might remember or you might have heard, we acquired a company called EveryMundo about two years ago, and there's a very specific vision for this acquisition. You can create the best offers, have the best AI, you can have all the distribution channels.
Surain Adyanthaya: But if you're not able to effectively present it to your buyer, then you're not getting the value and that's what EveryMundo does. The EveryMundo product, which is called airTRFX, and we now have called it Offer Marketing, presents millions of custom landing pages that are created on the fly. So if you have a consumer traveling from Orlando to San Francisco, they can get a custom landing page that in real-time configures itself to their buying need with information about what's going on there, calendar search, many different things. And we'll show you some data that this dramatically increases conversion and revenue for airlines. It's been a great fit. Now, the other virtuous cycle of offer marketing is when you're on the front end and you're presenting offers, you see what people buy and you also see what they don't buy. Historically in the travel world, revenue management, we do not use the negative space. We only use the booking information. Well now we have a virtuous cycle where we can feed revenue management and the AI algorithms what is offered and purchased and not purchased. Dramatically enriching the data set that we have to do better revenue management.
Surain Adyanthaya: And finally, SEO, search engine optimization. If people aren't seeing you as a leader in what they're searching for, then we don't have a place to start with all this great technology. And that's where the airTRFX offer marketing product shines. I think you might have gone to some of the workshops. We have customers who went from last to first in SEO. And the technology is built to support that. Portfolio Management. There's a saying in software development, where I studied computer science way back in the day. That if you care about software, you should care about hardware. Because the hardware really determines what you can do in software. Well, the same goes for offer and order. If you care about creating incredible offers, you should care about orders. Because this is how you fulfill and transact your orders. And your most amazing creative offers, if they can't be fulfilled properly, you've wasted your time. So we're intensely interested on the order side of the equation. And how do we break that down? There are two pieces of the order equation that we think are very important to creating great offers. One is the Product Catalog. The catalog is the set of all the products that you have to sell.
Surain Adyanthaya: And we believe the airline should own that information and control it. You should never have to pay someone else to know your own products. Second is the Stock Keeper. And this is traditionally called inventory, but I think we're trying to get away from legacy words. It's called the Stock Keeper now. That's the count of everything in your catalog. So you know in real-time what you have to sell and what you've sold already. And finally, there's the Supplier Automation. We believe in an open platform for order. So you have to connect the dots and the pieces, and that's where Supplier Automation comes in. Finally, on the order management side, you have order creation, servicing, integrity, payment orchestration, other things. We're not in the business of building that today, but we're keenly interested in what is being built for that. And if there are elements of this which do not allow the airline world to effectively create offers, we'll be there to complete that. So we're watching very closely on some of these capabilities. So let's move on to talking about the seat or the fare. Some are now calling it right to fly, because a seat could be seat selection and other things. And how these components make up the airline offer. First of all, we have dramatically new technology to optimize the seat. There's a technology called willingness to pay that you've probably heard about multiple times. If not, you will hear about it.
Surain Adyanthaya: And this is technology that truly uses some AI algorithms to predict an individual's needs and their willingness to buy higher fare classes. In revenue management, as you know, many times we have to have our users and analysts understand the markets, close fare classes, apply influences, overrides, et cetera. Willingness to pay allows AI to figure a lot of this out, dramatically decreasing the load of the analyst, letting them focus on the more strategic elements of running their markets. So this is a technology that you've probably heard some customers talking about. It's in production today. Continuous pricing is something that came up over a decade ago in the airline industry. Let's get away from the booking class. It's been a long journey, not for the science or the technology. Science and technology exist today to create continuous prices. In fact, we believe that on the backend, there should be no booking classes. The determination of bid price should be completely done without consideration of fare classes. And then on the input and the output side, depending on the distribution channel, we can decide how to convert that into something that's consumable by that channel.
Surain Adyanthaya: So this is something that's been in production. Lufthansa spoke about it last year's Outperform, and we are increasingly seeing airlines taking up continuous pricing, as clearly there's value in it of a couple of percentage points of revenue, which is pretty important. But beyond that, there's a huge first mover value that we've identified. Those airlines that have continuous pricing and are competing with airlines that are still thinking in the mindset of legacy booking classes have much more than the 1 or 2% benefit that we're talking about. Let's talk about ancillaries. Merchandising, bundling, of course, are table stakes to creating offers, to taking your ancillaries and putting products together and presenting it. But the evolution is now in utilizing AI to dynamically price ancillaries.
Surain Adyanthaya: And I'm going to click into that in two slides. But before that, let's talk about one important thing. And here are the products I already mentioned. Revenue management, RTDP, shopping, merchandising, and dynamic ancillary pricing. There's one very important part of the equation that we haven't spoken about, and that's knowing your customer. We're now working on a very innovative product called RSP, Request-Specific Pricing. And this is an AI algorithm where at the time of response to an availability request, it takes various signals in real-time and then modifies the response, tweaks it. For that particular request, that particular consumer, and it can use all sorts of information. It can use information about the type of request, the number of passengers in that request, what's the origin and destination, what's the time.
Surain Adyanthaya:
It can go down to the travel agency terminal number to decide what your response needs to be. We think this is going to be a revolutionary aspect of future offer creation, and you'll be hearing a lot more about it as we go forward. But let's jump into Dynamic Ancillary Pricing, because this is an innovation that we've worked very hard on for a couple of years, and it has just come into production. So this is really the coming out party for dynamic ancillary pricing AI. Essentially, in that entire journey of the traveler, from search to confirmation, there are many touch points that you as an airline have with the consumer. So how do you maximize the opportunity at each of those touch points by offering the right ancillaries at the right prices? We worked on that using real-time neural network AI algorithms and the results have been really, really, I'd like to call it spectacular, but I'll leave it to you to determine what you think of it. Essentially, we take a PROS AI agent that presents ancillaries in the marketplace. It observes what's booked, what's not booked. It reconciles that within its algorithm. It retrains its model and then ultimately generates a new set of prices and offers. And this is all done in an automated fashion by the AI algorithm in real-time.
Surain Adyanthaya:
And so there's a continuous learning loop of pricing, which we think is incredibly important for the airline industry. So why is this important? Most airlines have had rule-based ancillary pricing or even static pricing. Maybe they're updated once a month, maybe twice a year, maybe a little bit more frequently, but they certainly do not consider all the dynamics of the marketplace. That's the wall we're breaking through here. Here's how it works. A request comes into the airline booking engine. It's then sent to a merchandising product, either a PROS product or a third-party product. It's agnostic, and then the merchandising product gets a dynamic ancillary price for that particular request in the booking flow in real time. That price is then sent forward to the consumer, and then the action of the consumer is then sent back to the algorithm. What's the result of doing this? Well, this has been in production now for some time, and I'm happy to report that we're seeing great results. But why? Why are we seeing great results? It's because we're looking at each offer as a person, as an individual. We're then evaluating what their interest is, their leisure, business, family, and how do we create an offer that's truly meaningful to them that they will transact on? So in this example, you have two individuals.
Surain Adyanthaya:
You have one who is a leisure traveler and has a unique set of wants and requirements and expectations from you as an airline. And then you have another individual who's a frequent flyer. So they're two distinct personas and needs and wants, and this algorithm automatically discerns between them and decides what to offer and how to price it. So what happens when you put an algorithm like this in production? Well, airBaltic is our launch customer of Dynamic Ancillary Pricing. They've used it for seat selection, and it was an extensive process to test it versus rules versus the previous methodologies they had, and they've documented a 6% increase in ancillary revenues through the use of DAP. There are three things that drive this ROI that you should be interested in. First of all, as you know, revenue management products like this, they take some time to implement, deploy, train, et cetera. Dynamic Ancillary Pricing has a very short timeline. It's a one and a half month preparation phase where we're capturing data and training the models. Then there's a two and a half month learning phase, and then a two month A-B testing phase. That's how airBaltic did it. So they spent a total of, let's see, five or six months, but we think that in the future, an airline can actually implement this in less than two months.
Surain Adyanthaya:
you might hear PROS people talking to you about trialing this product because it can be very easily stood up, and you can see how it works in your airline and your markets. So let's talk about the marketing channels and how we address this. We have many different marketing channels, and the whole marketing funnel is very important to an airline. Because you not only have to be seen through SEO, but then you have to drive the demand to the purchasing channels. That's where our offer marketing products that comes in. airTRFX creates many custom pages to drive that marketing channel to a transactable offer. And here you'll see some of the results we're seeing. A 51% of the keywords that we use are in the top five in the searches for these airlines. 11% rank in the top 100. So we're seeing tremendous results with these products, and there are many customers here you can talk to. I'm going to speed up because I'm running out of time, but there's so much to talk about. But another aspect of this is the ability to reach customers in a very personalized way, personalized emails, where whenever the customer opens your personalized email, they will have a real up-to-date transactable price. So when you click, you go, you see the price, and you buy. This changes, amazing. And this can be distributed across various channels, ad stacks, social media, display ads, all in real time.
Surain Adyanthaya:
40% increase in click-through rates for ads that have dynamic prices and offers versus static prices. Staggering difference. And finally, on the offer-led retailing, some more statistics about bookability, 99 plus percent. If you make an offer, the biggest frustration is not being able to purchase what's shown to you. I spoke to you about the order management cycle and the portfolio. And I advise you to go to our Innovation Center, and we can talk to you more deeply about this and show you our thoughts and our prototypes in this area. So with that, I'd like to call on stage Sunil John, our Chief Product Officer, who has worked on these great products with his team. He'll talk more about them, and we'll show some demos.
Sunil John:
Well, thank you so much, Surain. Exciting, exciting things that Surain was able to share with you. But you know what's really fun is not only just sharing with you, but showing you. Who wants to see some product? All right. All right. This is going to be exciting. So we're going to begin with Justin Jander, showing you a little bit about how you can use our technologies that are available today. So while a lot of the content that Surain showed gives you a journey into the future, that future is unevenly distributed, as many technologists have said before me. What we're going to show you today is technology that's available for you today to optimize both the seats and the ancillaries. Justin?
Justin Jander:
Yeah, great. Can you hear me. Yes.
Sunil John:
Maybe? There it is. There you go.
Justin Jander:
Okay. All right, yeah, so I want to start out today with showing you a few of the things that Surain just talked about. So the first we're going to talk about is the concept of Request-Specific Pricing and continuous pricing. So what Surain talked about was that there were two key components that really made up the revenue management or offer optimization side. The first is an estimation of price elasticity, and the second is moving into a continuous pricing concept. And so by pairing those two things together, that really creates the opportunity to have the full picture of revenue management or the price-demand curve available to use. So we're really breaking free of the class code concept. So if we take a look at the demo, what you're going to see when it comes up.
Justin Jander:
There it is, hopefully yeah, all right, perfect. So what you're seeing here is a demo version of our OneSearch product as part of our dynamic offers solution. OneSearch is the mechanism that Surain talked about where it's our shopping engine as the portal. What I'm showing you here is a representation of what a user or a consumer would use on a meta search engine, for example, or on an airline's website. So I'm using that as the basis, but behind this is actual real Lufthansa data that's powering the real search. So if you went and searched on any particular meta search engine that we're working with, you would see this exact same setup here.
Justin Jander:
So, or you'd see the same results. So the key thing that we're going to look for here is I'm going to do the search. And so let's say that we're going to do Frankfurt to Rome. And we're going to do next week, the 27th through the 31st. So I have all of this set up. I have the setup here for particularly the meta search engine on Lufthansa's side. And as I said, this is production. So when I click search, it brings back the valid itineraries that make sense. And you can see just like a passenger would, you can see all the different itineraries that are available and the prices associated with those.
Justin Jander:
So of course, from the consumer side, I don't know what's happening in the background, right? All I know is what the price is. And that's the most important thing to you. But from the airline side, the most important thing is the price maximizing revenue for you. So if I take this particular flight, for example, now of course, the passenger doesn't get to see this level of detail, but because that's why I'm using the one search demo is so that you can see all of the information in the background. So when I look at this, you can see a couple things.
Justin Jander: First, I'm going to scroll down and you can see that the fare classes that were selected are the W class and the Quebec class. In those cases, I talked to my friends at Lufthansa ahead of this, and we looked at this particular itinerary. And in this case, the price elasticity estimation that we're using that's driven by PROS is pushing up three fare classes. So the underlying behavior of the system is actually going from Q class and a three classes below Q, pushing the demand up to Q. So that's the actual price elasticity estimation that's moving that demand up because of the behavior that we've recognized in the algorithm itself. But then it's not just offering the passenger Q class, the further extension of that is actually offering another further discount off of that to make it a continuous price.
Justin Jander:
So the filed fare for W and Q combined together is 214 euros, but with the continuous pricing algorithm, I further reduce that by 10 euros. So that's where you get the dynamic part of the solution. It's both the price elasticity component through Request-Specific Pricing combined with the continuous pricing algorithm that pair together to give me a price that both matches the elasticity of the passenger and includes the extra component of I no longer have the barrier of the filed fares in place and I can price at any point along the way. So we're really excited about this and there's more expansion coming. The dimensionality that we have in Request-Specific Pricing that determines the elasticity is growing and we have more opportunity here. So while the demo here, it's a lot of numbers on the screen.
Justin Jander:
We're still talking about letters of the alphabet and so forth, but the key component is that between the elasticity component and the continuous pricing algorithm, we pair those two things together to get a price that is between two filed fares and takes into account the passenger's elasticity. So this is a really big step towards moving towards a world where there are no more RBDs and we can start focusing on the right price that matters for the particular passenger. So that's the demo I had on continuous pricing and Request-Specific Pricing. The next step I want to do is talk a little bit about what Surain showed us from the Dynamic Ancillary Pricing. So Surain talked about airBaltic and they're our launch partner, so of course my demo would be airBaltic.com, right? So that's what's natural for us. Now if you happen to be at Outperform last year, I did a demo of Dynamic Ancillary Pricing at that time, but it was a demo of a mocked-up version of an IBE for an airline. And even if you remember, I even showed everybody my socks. I don't know if anybody remembers that.
Justin Jander:
No bets, but they're striped socks, not airline socks this week. Anyways, but the key thing here was we're now actually live with this. And so as Surain talked about, the work we did with airBaltic was allowed us to capture the price sensitivity two different four different seat types. And so what I'm going to show you is on airBaltic.com, imagine we want to go from Riga to Frankfurt. So we do that search. It's one passenger that I'm interested in. I'm going to pick Friday the 31st, a one-way flight. I select the flight, and I choose the particular flight I want. Because seat selection is the thing that we're interested in, I'm going to choose one that doesn't come with seat selection.
Justin Jander:
I make that choice. There's all my personal information there. Please feel free to call me later. Just kidding. Please don't do that. Actually, you can, I really don't mind. And so here we are. We land on this page, and you can see different prices for the different seats. So what's happening is dynamically we're choosing for all the different seat types that airBaltic has configured, whether they be extra leg room, left side of the plane, right side of the plane. They fly these beautiful 220s where you get two on the left, three on the right. And so they have different seat types, and those different seat types are able to be priced differently as needed.
Justin Jander:
So let's go see how dynamic this really is. So let's go back. We'll do another search. Still Riga to Frankfurt. This time we're going to do two passengers. We're going to pick the 31st. Again, same flight. We're going to pick the same morning departure there. We're going to pick the basic fare. My name's still there, but my daughter loves to fly, so we're going to use her as an example. And she her birthday is actually March 15th, so she takes airplanes as birthday gifts. She's a big fan of airplanes, so just kidding.
Justin Jander:
And so then we move there. And now, when this loads, you can see that we have differentiated pricing. So take this seat, for example, in row 12. You can see these two seats are 19 euros, but when it was just one passenger making the booking, the same seat was 14 euros. So what that recognized is is that as a passenger, there's a higher willingness to pay when you have an extra passenger in the request. So it understands who the passenger is, it understands the details of what they want, and the different price sensitivities or elasticities of the passenger making that decision in real-time, deciding how to price those two things differently.
Justin Jander:
So it really opens the door up for more revenue opportunity, and this really shows the 6% that Surain talked about before. This is where that opportunity comes from. It's allowing us to understand the difference in price, or the difference in price elasticity by different passenger types. So really thinking about the dimensionality of who is the passenger, performing that segmentation, and then applying those components. So again, really excited about the opportunity. There's tons of chance to see more about this this week, so we're going to have some sessions with Lufthansa on the Request-Specific Pricing and the disentangling concept this afternoon.
Justin Jander:
We're going to have sessions on willingness to pay also this afternoon, and some panels. And we're going to talk about airlines moving from revenue management to offer optimization, and that's also this afternoon. We also have a panel this week with airBaltic to talk about some of the details of the implementation and how that process went for them. So definitely, if you are interested, and we know you're interested, be sure to stop by and see those panels. And of course, stop by the Innovation Center to check out the booth. So with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Sunil.
Sunil John:
Thank you, Justin. The power of the platform is that we can take these algorithms, take these capabilities, ensemble them together, and make them available to you in an easy one-stop shop, so that you can get very creative on how you put these offers into the market without facing the shackles of the RBD structures that are behind the scenes on the order side. So this is what's possible today. And as Surain mentioned, when you put these offers together, that takes you so far. You also want to market those offers and get them in front of the passengers that are willing to buy right now. And I'm happy to welcome Anais to the stage, and she's going to tell you a little bit more about how you can take our offer marketing technology and get these powerful offers in front of your passengers.
Anais Engelmajer:
Thank you, Sunil. So, as Surain mentioned, airTRFX is a landing page generator at scale, and it also has the ability to create custom pages. So today I'm going to pretend I'm an airline marketer at American Airlines, and I'm setting up a custom page because I want to send out an email blast. I'm going to feature two of our new releases that we did earlier in Q1, and one of which is for miles fares that are going to be displayed on our dynamic pricing airModule, and the other, which is geolocation. Some of you have heard about these recently. So we're going to create a custom page for the US market because I'm going to actually be sending these emails to users that I know in my system, that I know have awards miles available to book, and I want them to travel this summer.
Anais Engelmajer:
All right, so OPDEMO, and I actually have the custom page here. So it has not been created yet. It's a 404. We're going to be refreshing this page in a little bit. We have a background image. It's active, so I submit. That's going to be saved, and it's been created successfully, but I'm going to wait for this to load, and we're going to come here and refresh the page. We're going to give it a second. Takes a minute. There we go. So my custom page is created. That's great, but there are no prices on here.
Anais Engelmajer:
I don't want to send users here. There's only a booking mask. So we're going to come back, and we're going to create a Dynamic Pricing airModule (DPA), and because I'm interested in having my customer, let's pick the Fare grid. I really like this visualization recently. Because I'm interested in my customer booking awards flights, I'm going to be creating a DPA that has awards flights. So the internal name, demo.
Anais Engelmajer:
Site edition is for the United States because that's the target, and it's going to be for domestic flights. So the United States, the United States. We're going to add that route. We're going to show 12 fares, and we're going to do a range between June and end of August when we want people to fly, and the return will be the same, but maybe to mid-September. They might come back a little later. We're going to activate that on a traffic's page, and the content.
Anais Engelmajer:
We're going to display images. We have different destinations, so we want to get travelers excited. We're going to have filters on here. So origin filter, destination filter, a budget in case they want to check things that are within their price limit, and instead of only having a DPA, that displays loyalty, so miles, fares, we're going to have a dropdown that displays, that allows them to switch between cash and award. So even though I'm targeting passengers or customers that have booked with me that I know have miles available, they may not want to book with those miles. They may be saving it for something else. And then we'll come to advance, but on page load, instead of displaying cash, I'm going to display miles because I think that this is what they're interested in.
Anais Engelmajer:
If I wanted to target weekend getaways, we could change days of the week, but we're not going to do that, so I'm going to finish this up and save, and we're going to come back to our custom page and update the layout with this new DPA we created. And once I do this, we're going to refresh. We'll drag this up here. We're going to save that, and we're going to refresh. It's going to take a second. So on page load, we see that the page has refreshed, and we have summer getaways, no pre-population, so the user who's going to receive this is just seeing the most popular fares from anywhere in the US to anywhere in the US.
Anais Engelmajer:
We are displaying miles, but because we have geolocation turned on, the user will be prompted to let the browser know their location. So if I allow this, oh, we have a problem. Well, if I allow this, usually this will be updated to pre-populate Orlando, but Justin's MacBook does not allow you to locate him. So everything would be updated here. We would see Orlando displayed on both the booking mask and here. And so the fares that we would display would be based on my nearest airport.
Anais Engelmajer:
Geolocation locates the user, finds their nearest airport, and then the page updates with that information. So you would have this option. As an airline marker, they're sending emails. I might also have a user's nearest airport or their most popular airport they fly from, and I could use the URL parameters to pre-populate that as well. But this is basically it. We just created a custom page, added a custom airModule on there, and then we could send an email blast out every two weeks, and this would be updated dynamically based on the most relevant fares to the users in that moment.
Anais Engelmajer:
That's it, thank you.
Sunil John:
Awesome. Thank you, Anais. So what you've seen in these first few demos is what we believe is the leading AI-powered offer management solution on the market, the platform on the market. You can manage your seats, you can manage your ancillaries, and you can market those offers. What we're going to see now is, as I invite Chris to the stage, come on up, Chris, is our progress in portfolio management. So as Surain mentioned, the catalog and the stock-keeper, you're going to see a little progress that we've made in this area. Chris?
Christopher Allison:
Yeah, thanks, Sunil. Yeah, excuse me. It's great to be up here to introduce our range of portfolio management solutions, so yeah, let's take a look. And as you saw earlier, and as Sunil just mentioned, PROS Portfolio Management consists of our Product catalog, Stock Keeper, and Supplier Automation. And behind me, you'll see our product catalog prototype solution.
Christopher Allison:
So yeah, let's maybe dive into this first. So we used our experience in actually our non-air travel verticals and our success there, and we took this to approach and inform our approach to the air travel product catalog. And then we applied the experience that we've gained over all of these years in our offer optimization and offer creation for airlines to come up with our product catalog for airlines.
Christopher Allison:
But actually, yeah, what does this mean for you as this will continue working in the background? But basically, to enable your transition to modern airline retailing based on offers and orders, you now have an off-PSS production-proven, at-scale solution to define your range of products and take ownership. You're able to define your range of products, their descriptions, attributes, combinability, and in conjunction with PROS Supplier Automation, you're also able to now sync the product catalogs of your third-party suppliers, and all of this enables you to become that true retailer and begin to unlock some of that value that Surain talked us through earlier.
Christopher Allison:
And on top of this, the catalog is also fully powered by PROS AI from everything through generating product descriptions and bundle descriptions through to recommending combinability and bundling approaches based on, for example, conversion data and learning from attachment rates and things like that. And yeah, and beyond the Product Catalog, the Stock Keeper, this is a way of taking full control of your inventory and freeing you from the limitations that you find today with PSS-based inventory. Yeah, and as an airline, you should be the owner of your own inventory data, and the PROS Stock Keeper allows you to be just this and take ownership.
Christopher Allison:
And in the end, this leaves your PSS and in time, your order management system to perform their primary purpose, which is in the end just to execute on the commercial strategy that you've defined, hopefully powered by the PROS Platform. And finally, the Supplier Automation module, this is the way to enable scalability in terms of your relationships with your third-party suppliers. And as part of this group, we can include your airline partners, your interline partners, as well as your suppliers of air and non-air products as well.
Christopher Allison:
And yeah, and you can synchronize the catalogs there. And actually, the importance of this is to take away the kind of day-to-day operational burden from your analysts, and they can focus more on the commercial strategy and yeah, leave the day-to-day operational stuff to automation. And yeah, and actually having seen all of this, and this is very much a short teaser.
Christopher Allison:
I wish we had more time to dive into the detail. But yeah, I'm sure you have hopefully many questions. And yeah, you'd like to learn more, so please see us in the Innovation Center, and we can walk you through the prototype and show you a lot more and show you how these products and how the stock comes to life. And also at 3.45, I'm also presenting our new PROS NDC solution with our launch partner, Air Europa. And there, we're going to be discussing NDC as a, sorry, PSS Agnostic NDC as an enabler of commercial freedom and flexibility and dynamic offers. Yeah, thank you.
Sunil John:
So every platform that's worth its salt has an idea of extensibility built into it. And so when we think about different ways to extend our platform, one of the ways we materialize that is through our marketplace. Jany's going to, I'm going to invite Jany up to the stage right now. And what she's going to share with you is the launch of our marketplace that has all of our products across all of our end markets on it. And how we can use the marketplace to get new content, content that we produce, content that our partners produce, content that you produce into a production solution through the marketplace. Jany?
Jany Cairo:
Thank you, everyone. I am here today to close the demos. And all of those amazing products and demos that you have seen and features are now showcasing in the PROS Marketplace. I'm very excited. The PROS Marketplace is the place where customers like you, or prospective customers, come to close the gap between inspiration, evaluation, and purchase. Right now, we are showcasing more than 150 products there. So you can access them anywhere, anytime. I see a lot of you having your computers and your phones. So whenever I'm done, I hope you can visit our Marketplace so you can start browsing our products. I want you to think about the PROS Marketplace as an evolving ecosystem. We are moving very fast and trying to keep the trend. So eventually, it will become an enterprise-level application store where developers, it might be in-house developers or partners, come to deploy solutions in a secure way so we can meet the needs for enterprise-level customers like you looking for solutions to increase your conversions. So let's just take a look on the Marketplace. This is the Marketplace, guys. When you arrive here, you will be able to find products by different paths. Maybe I don't know where to start, so maybe I am a marketer or maybe a revenue management specialist. So you can pick your department. And then when you click Continue, you will arrive on the product search results page where you will see all of the products matching that criteria.
Jany Cairo:
But maybe I'm already a customer of PROS, and I know more or less the products that I have bought, and I'm more interested in staying the know. So maybe I can find products based on the recent releases or trending products that we have right now based on the market. Or maybe I'm very really into AI-powered tools that PROS is releasing and all of the trend with that. By clicking view all, you will get to that page with all of the products matching those criteria. Or better then, maybe you are an airline, or you come from the manufacturing or hospitality industry, and you just click on your industry and you will arrive to a page with all of the products PROS is offering right now related to that industry. On top of that, we wanted to keep you in the know. So if you wanted to understand what are our recent releases, what are the articles, news, product highlights, the Marketplace is meant to be the one-stop hub for PROS product information. We are consolidating and getting all of the PROS product information in the Marketplace. So let's say that I have made my mind and I am a marketer.
Jany Cairo:
So I click continue and I arrive on this product search page. In here you have a variety of filters to the left, but maybe you don't really are into these categories. Maybe you wanted to use your own keywords. Let's say I'm looking for inspirational tools so I can get all the results, or maybe let's say I want to engage my loyalty community. So maybe I wanted to see all of the PROS products that have the feature loyalty or are oriented for that. You can click on loyalty and then you get all of the products. Or maybe you are into pricing because you come from a different industry. So you can use your own keywords and you will get all of the PROS products that are matching that criteria. So we make it easy for you to find it. Another way to find the products is from every single pages in the search bar. You can dive down and you can see all of the products matching that criteria, or maybe you don't call it loyalty, you call it redemption. Or maybe you are really interested into getting more information on the geolocation feature that we just launched for Offer Marketing. So just type out your location and you get all of the products supporting geolocation and even an article. So if you click on that article, you will see more information on how to maximize your revenue using geolocation, even with FAQs.
Jany Cairo:
So going back to the products search results, let's say that I'm in marketing and I'm really interested in maps. And this premium Fare finder map looks interesting. So let's take a look at it. In here you will find the product name, details, even a gallery of images where you can see how the product behaves and some of the most important use cases. You can even see a live demo, so you can play with that Fare finder map real life and you can get to understand how the product was, without even talking to us. Let's say that I'm in Miami and then I get all the results but then I wanted to use the full screen and then you can start interacting with that product and see how it looks and how it behaves.
Jany Cairo:
You can see that it's general availability, that means that everyone can buy it. It's meant to be for the airlines industry. It was developed by PROS in collaboration with Frontend, with one of our development partners. They have their own page where they have the rest of the products they have been amazing creating with us across the years. And then you can see the product features that map has. So you can find something that resonate with you there on that product, reasons why you should buy that product in really small bites so you can digest that information quickly and related articles because maybe even before talking to us or while talking, you wanted to understand better how that feature or product works and also related products that you might find interesting if you're looking for that particular one.
Jany Cairo:
If you wanted to get more information on the products, you can go to the product insights page where you will get our latest platform releases, how to maximize your 12 recommendations with your location and so forth, so on, with all of the features that we are releasing. And this is evergreen content. We are constantly, every single feature that we launch our product is hosted here so you can find it anytime, anywhere. Again, so this is the marketplace. I invite you all to go to marketplace.pros.com. I will be in the booth in the Innovation Center. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us. We are very excited with having all of the PROS suite of products hosted in the same place and accessible to you. Thank you so much.
Sunil John:
Thank you, Jany.
Surain Adyanthaya:
Thanks, Sunil. Thanks, team. And to just to tie it all together, the marketplace, we believe, is truly an innovation that is going to transform the industry. As you already heard, we have over 150 products on the marketplace. We believe that truly no one has a corner on innovation. There are startups, there are customers. We want every one of you to be able to innovate on top of the PROS AI and data platform and to present it to the world in the marketplace. Very excited. What does this represent? Interoperability, modularity, the ability to find best in class for whatever your needs are, and finally, an enhanced ecosystem for co-developing and networking. So you'll hear a lot more about this in the coming weeks. It's in production, it's out there. Please go explore the marketplace. Thank you.