Industry colleagues,
Happy New Year! Now 2024 is here and the work for true modern airline retailing not only continues but ramps up to a new level of innovation. I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I would put my money on 2024 being the year the industry takes its biggest step yet toward dynamic offer creation becoming a bona-fide reality.
Back in October 2022, I announced an aggressive industry outcome goal of providing the framework needed to enable 80 percent of offers sold to be generated dynamically by 2026. Now, we are only two years away from this goal. When I first made this declaration, ATPCO estimated that only 16 percent of the offers sold in the market were dynamically created. A few months ago, onstage at our Focus Summit+ conference in Dubai, we announced that our estimate had increased by more than 40 percent since 2022. We expect this acceleration to continue in 2024, due in part to some of the framework solutions ATPCO is creating for the industry, including our soon-to-be launched Product Catalogue, which are electronic records of products and services, offered by airlines, that will serve multiple use cases to provide seamless interoperability in maintaining data for traditional and dynamic offers.
In 2023 we saw clear acceleration, and ATPCO will continue to pave a path for airlines to get where they want to go with dynamic offers. I want to share some major milestones we achieved as we drive industry-wide adoption of customized offers:
- Acquisition of data intelligence platform 3Victors: In December, we announced the key strategic purchase of 3Victors. This acquisition will position ATPCO as the industry’s leading source of competitive airline pricing and shopping data and enable our airline customers and their technology partners access to new and advanced data, and data science capabilities to build and transform dynamic offer creation capabilities.
- New airlines utilizing our premier pricing tool Architect: The industry demand and interest in our premier airline pricing solution, Architect, continues to grow. It was our strongest year ever, with more airlines signing than ever before, bringing the total partners to more than 30 airlines, making Architect the leading product in the market.
- Best-in-class merchandising: Routehappy now powers modern merchandising capabilities for more than 50 forward-looking airlines. Channels are also integrating this content at adoption rates not seen before, as key partners like Expedia Group, Concur, and several others all introduced new UPA (Universal Product Attributes) integrations to up their merchandising game by showcasing their offers with visuals.
- Growth in Branded Fares continues: Branded Fares, the starting point for airlines to understand the value of segmented customer offers is also showing incredible signs of growth. Fifty new airlines started participating in 2023, bringing the industry total to over 270 retail-minded partners offering their customers choice and improving revenue optimization.
- System reliability and record-breaking industry fare volumes: ATPCO year over year continues to achieve 99.9 percent reliability, delivering an always-on, reliable service that powers the industry ecosystem. We remain committed to interoperability, as we continue to exist between two worlds of filed fares and dynamic offer creation, ATPCO is breaking our own database records, now exceeding 323 million fares, and changes continue to show incredible volumes with more than 4.2 billion changes in a single day.
- Sustainability remains top of mind: In a new partnership, ATPCO integrated IATA CO2 Connect data to power our new Routehappy Amenity for sustainability insights. The flight shopper–friendly data provides data transparency linked to airline-specific actual fuel burn information and load factors.
- Diversity commitments: In 2023, ATPCO joined IATA’s 25by2025 global initiative to increase female representation in the aviation industry. ATPCO committed to increasing its female talent across its senior management ranks by 2025 to promote more gender balance in the company and the industry at large.
ATPCO’s journey is nearly 60 years in progress, and as we continue to be proud of all we have accomplished, the level of innovation and progress we will see over the next few years will most certainly escalate at a pace we have never seen before. We are excited to be with you on this voyage, and my promise is to continue to listen to your feedback so that together we can adapt to the industry’s changing needs.
I’m looking forward to giving all of you an in-person update at our Elevate + TravelConnect event, which is jointly hosted by ATPCO and ARC. It’s being held on 9-11 April 2024 in Washington, DC. This conference offers an excellent opportunity to contribute to your journey. I hope to see many of you there as we work together to reach our goals, because each of you is an important part of how we get there.
Alex Zoghlin
