How automating airline contracts was a seamless solution for ITA Airways
With market conditions surpassing pre-pandemic levels but only limited resources to handle them, ITA Airways needed a solution to modernize their airline contract processes and reduce the time to market for private fares. Combining the automation capabilities of ATPCO’s Express Contracts with Volaro’s FarePro integration services was easily the best solution to solve this challenge for ITA Airways.
Express Contracts allows an airline to automate its manual coding activities, which means it can turn signed contracts into bookable fares in minutes. The Volaro FarePro integration service enables seamless integration with Express Contracts. ITA Airways saw the robust capabilities and significant benefits of these solutions when making their choice to move ahead with the integration.
The business need
Speed up time to market and increase data accuracy and control
Coming from using only manual processes, which were time consuming, potentially error-prone, and inefficient, ITA Airways realized they were losing valuable time and spending unnecessary resources on getting fares to market while losing ownership and control of their data from outsourced processes. They needed a solution that would decrease their time to market, increase their accuracy and control over their data, and seamlessly work with their Salesforce application they use to manage the workflow and storage of their corporate contracts.
The solution
A fully automated workflow with Express Contracts
Volaro customized the integration to fit ITA Airways’ requirements and removed the need to allocate internal technical resources for integration. The integration between existing processes and ATPCO’s Express Contracts enabled ITA Airways to create a fully automated workflow in house, reducing the burden for fare filing expertise and freeing up resources across their organization.
By using these solutions, they were able to regain control of their data while decreasing resources and increasing efficiency for their team. According to ITA Airways Revenue Optimization Head of Strategic & Business Segment Pricing – Ancillaries Pricing, Marzia Maisano, the process of integrating was “fluid and simple.”
The results
Blazing speed: 93% of contracts processed in under 30 minutes
By collaborating with Volaro and ATPCO, ITA Airways was able to fully integrate Express Contracts to production within three months. On average, Express Contracts processes 93 percent of their contracts in under 30 minutes. Existing contracts were in the market within hours, and their internal service level agreements for new contracts drastically improved from taking more than two weeks to now taking just hours or even minutes.
“Implementing this solution has had a huge impact for our team’s efficiency in terms of time to market and revenue. We are now managing close to a thousand contracts with Express Contacts, which allows our revenue management team to focus their resources on more strategic initiatives rather than marginal issues,” said Marzia.
Conclusion
Express Contracts and Volaro have helped ITA Airways leverage the rapidly increasing fare volumes. They have been so satisfied with the partnership and collaboration with ATPCO and Volaro that they're now exploring covering their entire private fares portfolio with Express Contacts, including both leisure and tourism fares.
With a growing demand for private program travel, using Express Contacts can help meet and exceed customer expectations and commitments, improve accuracy, eliminate backlogs, and increase throughput.
The question of automating is not “if,” but “when.” Automation is the future of modern airline offer creation, and Express Contracts helps provide ITA Airways with a competitive advantage as long-haul and short-haul business travel continues to reach record-breaking levels.