How does Infare support airports in their decision-making processes?
Nils Gelbjerg-Hansen: Working with airlines for nearly two decades, we have been able to reach high levels of airfare quality, which our customers have defined in terms of transparency, consistency and accuracy. This is the stepping stone on which we have developed our business intelligence tools.
We collect, process, validate and structure two billion airfare observations every day, covering a total of 80,000 origins and destinations (O&Ds). Based upon this huge amount of airfare information – collected over the past 17 years – we have developed our business intelligence (BI) solutions for airports. The intuitive interfaces enable airports to quickly visualise billions of airfares, thus getting an overview of price developments at flight, route, network or airport level.
Infare Altus is an analytical tool with more than ten years of accumulated historical data. What advantages does the product offer to your customers?
Altus allows its users to perform in-depth studies and analysis of airfares to understand new routes’ profitability and level of competition. It is a BI tool based on our historical database containing one trillion airfares, and is growing by two billion airfares every day. Altus is designed to support airport route-planning departments.
An example of Altus’s usability is the analysis we recently carried out on Norwegian’s operations for the route from London Gatwick Airport to John F Kennedy International Airport in New York. The goal was to establish whether the strategy was paying off from a revenue perspective.
The convenience of using Altus’s airfare database and intuitive visualisation made it possible to estimate that Norwegian achieved multimillion-dollar operating earnings for this route. Without using airfare information, the estimation would have not been possible. What’s more, it was easy to identify the impact that the carrier’s operations had on another competing route: London Heathrow to JFK.
Which airports have you collaborated with so far?
At present, our BI tools support analysis on more than 80,000 O&Ds, which correspond to 95% of the global routes with direct competition. As a consequence, our solutions are actively used by airports all over the world. Among them are Hamburg, Gatwick, Heathrow, Copenhagen, Billund, Avinor, Montpellier, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne and Brisbane. Our airfare BI tools are mainly used by airports to get additional insight on their current airline customers, which translates into network-performance monitoring, profitability analysis and route-development activities.
Our solutions are the result of a continuous dialogue with some of our superusers and first customers. For instance, we started the dialogue with Hamburg Airport over four years ago, when we were at the initial phase of the development of our airports tool. Being able to listen, adjust, change and adjust once again is not an easy task. However, over the past 17 years of business operations, we realised that it is a very important task to tackle. Therefore, in my opinion, it is probably one of the most important elements for us to focus upon.
How does Infare anticipate its approach to the analysis of airfare and routes evolving in the future?
Data – especially big data – is the new oil. This is particularly true of the aviation industry. However, only the right combination of big airfare data and adequate visualisation can lead to actual insight. Having access to tools that are able to process huge amounts of data and to turn it into information one could really act upon is a must, not a ‘nice to have’.
When it comes to our tools, Infare will be focusing even more on BI, and especially on advanced features therein. As a matter of fact, we believe that users are, now more than ever, in need of tools supporting faster and more precise decision-making.
