Dear colleagues,
I hope that you, your family, and your team are safe and well. Since my letter to you on 18 March, we have seen new realities present an extraordinary moment for our industry and the world, one that continues to bring us new challenges and ideas as we adapt.
At the beginning of this crisis, I committed to ensuring that ATPCO’s core focus and essential purpose would remain the same: operational reliability and the timely distribution of airline content around the world. This has not and will not change. In fact, since the start of the year, we have experienced 99.8% uptime, and processed an average of 12 million daily fare/rule changes through our systems.
Over the last few months, we have quickly focused our resources to help you, our customers and industry partners, respond and adapt to new market conditions. We are all in this together, and we are listening to you every day to better understand your challenges and priorities. That's why we have taken these actions:
Rapid delivery of new industry solutions
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Launched Emergency Flexibility measures as an industry solution enabling airlines to automate the processing of flight changes and refunds for previously issued tickets, ultimately making it much easier for airlines to provide passengers with greater flexibility for previously booked travel.
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Created Reassurance UPAs, pro bono, to increase customer confidence in air travel by presenting critical health information upfront in the customer shopping path. This new type of retailing content was delivered in the market as an airline industry solution on 7 April and now covers nearly all of the global flight schedule. The value of these UPAs is already proving to be significant as travel agency partners are reporting higher conversion rates when they display Reassurance UPAs than when they are not.
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Implemented US government tax holiday enhancements to ensure airlines would benefit from the policy change. Under aggressive timelines, we facilitated coordination with IATA, A4A, and airlines to ensure you would have the needed functionality live on the effective date.
Stronger industry-wide collaboration
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Increased meeting frequency with the ATPCO Advisory Council to provide stronger feedback loops into immediate industry needs, which allowed us to reprioritize our product development plans to devote more resources to the enhancements that are most critical to recovery.
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Selected by ACH to rebuild its settlement services infrastructure, which reduces risk for all by keeping critical processing within an industry-owned ecosystem.
New value for customers, through key services
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Launched MyATPCO, a new customer portal with easy navigation, intelligent search, and new, digital-friendly opportunities to share industry feedback and collaborate with us.
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Free virtual training and e-learning courses have been made available for all customers. If you don't see what you need, let us know.
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Opened access to an industry news tracker and events calendar. These two new resources help your teams stay informed with the latest market updates by region and carrier, and quickly gather new dates for industry events.
While I'm proud to share what ATPCO has done to quickly deliver value to you in response to our new reality, I also don't expect to slow down as we move further into the second half of 2020.
You can look forward to broader industry engagement, where we will build on each other's strengths as we work through the opportunities and challenges of our new market. There are many opportunities to get involved. Our next industry forum, planned for the end of August, is focused on retailing and open to airlines, systems, sales channels, and tech partners. I invite you to email us to learn more or indicate your interest in attending.
Thank you again for putting your trust in us to help you navigate this daunting time in our industry’s history. ATPCO is here to provide critical pricing and retailing infrastructure, and we will continue to innovate by developing value-based solutions and resources to help you run your business.
If you have any questions or thoughts for us, I welcome you to reach out.
Thanks,
Rolf Purzer
President and CEO
