Glossary for the airline industry
From A-Z, this glossary covers definitions and explanations for common airline industry terminology.
One type of Routehappy Content, Amenities data describes features of the onboard experience, including seat pitch/type, Wi-Fi, power, and entertainment, in standardized data that can be compared with other offers. See also UTA and UPA.
Services and products associated with a fare, product, or offer; includes items such as commission-based products, checked bags, and assigned seating.
Application Programming Interface
A small application that performs one specific task, typically running under the control of a larger application, such as a web browser.
The fares (or rates) that may be combined with an international fare (or rate) published to a gateway to create a through-fare. Arbitraries may not be sold separately for travel and are usually published between points within the same country. Also referred to as add-ons or proportionals.
The text that defines fare class combinability. Arbitrary buckets may be fare class specific, generic (such as A***** and B*****), or default (******). The default bucket is often referred to as the negative or six-star bucket.
Applicable to international tariffs only, a zone is a component of an add-on record that defines the geographic area of the published fare with which the add-on will construct.
Airlines Reporting Corporation.
IATA divides the world into three areas, also referred to as Traffic Conferences (TC): Area 1: Western Hemisphere Area 2: Europe, Africa, Middle East Area 3: Asia, Pacific
Available seat kilometers; an industry measure of capacity, calculated by multiplying the total number of seats by the distance of the flight.
Available seat miles; an industry measure of capacity, calculated by multiplying the total number of seats by the distance of the flight.
An ATPCO subscription that provides merged pricing and restrictions data to support airline pricing, revenue management, and intelligence processes. This structured dataset calculates total price values and simplifies data aggregation (and analysis) by combining the applicable fare rules with the price points.
A dynamic pricing method where the system selects one or more prices from a finite menu of possible price points. Each price point may be associated with various rules or restrictions that determine how or when that price can be selected. The menu of price points may be updated periodically, but there is only a limited and discrete set of possible prices that can be selected at any given time. The selection of a price from the menu could be made infrequently or, at the limit, on a transaction-by-transaction basis.
Air Traffic Conference.
Any item that can be offered to a customer (such as air and/or other types of transportation, transportation portions, any goods, and amenities, etc.). For example, a Product can be the actual transportation service (right to travel), a hard product (such as seats and meals), or a soft product (such as flexibility and priority boarding). Also called product.
Airline Tariff Publishing Company. A corporation owned by various airlines formed to serve as agent for those owners (and for other airlines or vendors) to file and publish tariffs and related products.
Proprietary technical standards established by consensus to provide consistent results for pricing and retailing automation across the travel ecosystem. These include the following documents:
- Data Dictionary, comprising file layouts, field descriptions, validation edits, and abbreviated descriptions of processing (interface standard)
- Industry reference codes used in processing (appendices)
- Full descriptions of data processing (matching and application) to produce a consistent pricing or retailing result (processing standard)
- Data maintenance (load, store, data management)
ATPCO standard Optional Services taxonomy codes organized into hierarchical levels that can be used to define and classify a product within a set of defined parameters. The Taxonomy enables product identification, product sorting, and product comparison. Note that the Airline Catalog and Supplier Catalog support Group, Subgroup, and Descriptions 1 and 2 levels.
ATPCO Automated Rules Category 33 that automates the processing of rules and restrictions governing refunds for tickets.
ATPCO Automated Rules Category 31 that automates the processing of rules and restrictions governing exchanges for tickets.