Trust & Security
FareNet Accuracy
Managing Accuracy of Dynamic Fares Powered by FareNet
PROS’s airTRFX fare marketing platform enables an airline to launch and manage dedicated webpages for every destination, route, origin, event, interest, and other flight research and purchase criteria (in any language and market and on any device).
At the heart of the airTRFX platform is its self-reliant ability to power dynamic fares on all of its pages. airTRFX pages comprise standard and custom dynamic fare modules, such as top deals modules, low fare histograms and calendars, fare filter tools, and any other fare visualization conceived by our airline partners.
It is important for any current or prospective user of airTRFX to understand how PROS collects, manages, and disseminates fares, and the measurement of accuracy we undertake.
FareNet: Real-time Fare Collection and Dissemination
FareNet is PROS’s proprietary pixel which, when placed in an airline’s booking engine and configured, enables PROS to collect all flight information, fares, and anonymous user activities that occur during the natural course of user flight search and purchase in an airline’s booking engine.
An airline places FareNet on the flight selection pages of its booking engine, and PROS “recycles” the content shown to actual booking engine entrants. Because of the cutting edge big data aggregation and processing system built and managed by PROS (known as DataCore™), when FareNet collects information, PROS is able to disseminate that information in real-time.
The ongoing fare update process executed by PROS via FareNet is at the heart of the accuracy measurement and management of the dynamic fare content on airTRFX.
FareNet vs. Traditional Fare Cache Solutions
The FareNet method of Fare collection and dissemination affords numerous benefits to the airline relative to traditional fare cache tools:
Real-time/Streaming:
FareNet refreshes a fare every time a user searches for that flight in the airline booking engine and streams that fare into production in real-time for maximum accuracy – average of roughly 90%.
Traditional fare cache tools refresh at set intervals and disseminates via batch processing.
Accuracy Optimization for Demand and Fare Volatility:
Volatile fares are more likely to be inaccurately presented by a fare cache; however, fare volatility is correlated to increased flight purchase (and search).
With FareNet, the more frequently a flight is searched and purchased, the more often FareNet refreshes the fare being disseminated. This results in a “self-fulfilling prophecy” where FareNet is updating the fares more frequently for the flights with the highest search volume (which have volatile fares).
Traditional fare cache tools treat all flights equally – the fare for a high search volume, highly volatile flight is refreshed just as frequently as a low search volume flight.
USDOT Consumer Protection Compliance:
The USDOT regulations require that digital promotion of fares to consumers be executed in a way that puts forth maximum reasonable effort to ensure accuracy and, more importantly, correct inaccuracy as soon as possible.
The FareNet method on airTRFX fully complies with these regulations – if a user clicks on a FareNet-aggregated fare on airTRFX and finds a different fare in the booking engine, FareNet is immediately refreshing that fare to match that seen by the user in the booking engine.
Traditional fare cache tools do not react immediately to remedy a fare inaccuracy.
Supplementing Natural User Search with Additional Fares:
Because FareNet populates in real-time the DataCore™ system with fares seen by actual user, it is possible to increase the volume of fares in DataCore by the following methods:
1. Automated Flight Search: PROS offers a premium solution to schedule and run incremental automated flight searches in an airline’s booking engine in order to supplement the search volume providing fare content to FareNet. This tool can be helpful if an airline would like to refresh the fares of certain unpopular flights, or possibly newly launched flights.
2. Traditional Fare Cache Integration: PROS’s solutions are open to integration; numerous airlines provide EveryMundo a traditional fare cache to integrate into DataCore and supplement the fares collected via FareNet. We consider this the “best of both worlds”.
Accuracy Measurement and Reporting:
PROS’s average accuracy of 90% is based on real-world measurement of the fare selected by users on airTRFX and the percentage of time it matches the fare displayed by the airline in its booking engine. We define accuracy in this way to ensure our calculation of accuracy is weighted to reflect the volume of flight search for each flight – not all flights are treated the same.
Traditional fare cache tools measure accuracy by running a bulk refresh across all flights in the cache and comparing the accuracy of the refreshed fares to the prior fares. This method does not reflect the reality of the user experience.