According to the Wall Street Journal, the average “profit per passenger” of the seven largest U.S. airlines was $17.75, for a one-way flight, while the average profit margin across those airlines was 9% in 2017. Not much when you consider the high cost of operating a carrier. The high-quality data that is collected from an airline’s operational systems such as reservation data, ticketing, booking, and loyalty, is typically stuck in organizational silos, making it difficult to find ways to increase the “profit per passenger” numbers and respond to market needs.

Advances in technology, especially with data analytics can play a key role in learning more about what travelers need and want with their interactions with a company.

Integrating data across the enterprise can be a way to increase profit margins, deepen customer loyalty and enhance operations. In order to take advantage and leap ahead of the competition, companies need to think about the following:

• Increasing Real-time data (or near-real-time data) throughout the company to meet the demands of the “digital customer”;
• Build automated workflows and orchestration to make the customer experience seamless from beginning to end;
• Invest in infrastructures and platforms that can deliver new innovations for increasing revenue and improve customer experiences faster.

Digitization and connecting all touchpoints across the customer journey results in more revenue and resources to stay ahead of industry changes and challenges. Time spent on integrating data equates to more resources spent on future innovations.

Sabre’s Intelligence Exchange (IX) is one platform for system wide integration of reservation data and exponential increase in customer-facing systems. The proven success experienced by one US airliner resulted in incorporation of their reservation data to improve customer experience by providing timely information on flight status; real-time loyalty transaction information; and day-of-flight notifications such as the moment flight is boarding.

Sabre Intelligence Exchange

Sabre’s Intelligence Exchange is a real-time data-integration platform that helps in gathering disparate, or siloed data, from across the enterprise and enabling the creation of custom applications, analytics and reports, and centralized integration of downline systems to workoff a centralized database.

Benefits of utilizing Sabre IX include:

• A User Interface (UI) that enables custom code and enables rapid development;
• Advanced analytics and data augmentation that enrich core data with platform API plug-ins;
• Data enrichment and rules engines to execute custom business processes and interaction with other applications.
• Flexible tools for rapid development and faster time to market.

The extensibility of the Sabre IX platform can provide a path to digital transformation by integrating different operational systems into the Sabre IX meta-model, applying rules and triggering enterprise events to drive external processes.

Sabre IX Solution for Airlines

A great place to start is to incorporate an existing Canonical Data Model for your organization into the Sabre IX meta-model. This will allow for analysis and mapping of operational data to the Booking Domain, Customer Domain, Inventory Domain, and Ticket/Sales of the IX meta-Model.

IX Web Service Endpoint provides an interface to ingest, store and propagate domain data between IX and operational systems, using queue-based events, or web services. System events can be defined using Common Condition Language, which are then filtered and processed as they are ingested into IX.

Another key solution function is the design and implementation of Sabre IX Analyzers via the IX Data Analysis Framework. These Java plugins analyze incoming data and produce derived dynamic data within the IX Operational Data Store (ODS). The analyzers can be built and registered within the IX Systems Data Store (SDS) to achieve diverse goals, such as customer experience, no-show probability, or fraud detection.

Real world results

A major US airline launched their Reservation Data Integration platform using Sabre IX toward the end of 2016. They released a platform that will continue to improve overall travel experience of their customers for years to come. By developing APIs and web services and extending reservation data to multiple customer-facing systems including .com, kiosk, mobile, and loyalty, travellers are now provided the most timely information during their trips.

About Rythmos

Seattle-based Rythmos has been building solutions for the airline industry for over a decade. Starting with the migration of Alaska Airlines’ Mileage Plan, from a home-grown legacy application to a new platform, is an example of the sophisticated and complex solutions successfully delivered. Since then, Rythmos’ customer base now reaches across national and global companies who have taken advantage of Rythmos’ airline-industry expertise to solve increasingly complex data problems.