Were your Diwali season tickets on routes like Mumbai-Delhi or Mumbai-Kolkata priced according to the demand? Do destination routes like Delhi-Goa, New York-Miami, and London-Geneva come to your mind when thinking about Christmas ticketing plans?
Factors such as holidays, festivals, and weather conditions all year round shape up to form Seasonality patterns. Airlines especially gauge seasonality to capitalize on popular travel routes during peak seasons, like Christmas (for example on the Delhi-Goa, London-geneva route) or Diwali (for example on the Delhi-Mumbai or Mumbai-Kolkata route). This leads to a noticeable increase in ticket prices.
But wait, only single-mindedly concentrating on peak season demand patterns to generate most of your revenue is not enough anymore. We have a concrete reason to say so! Read ahead to find out how AirViaje.ai has decoded the travel seasons around the year.
Unraveling Seasonality: Exploring variations in seasonal patterns
Seasonality refers to the annually observed demand pattern behavior and its effects on ticket fares. It plays a key role in airline ticket pricing throughout the year. Every region experiences different seasonal price fluctuations due to region-specific demand fluctuations.
Seasonality within a year drapes various coats and hence is often categorized as,
Peak season: Coinciding with optimal weather patterns or festive proceedings that attract a lot of tourists to famous destinations. This is the time when Seasonality travels with full steam ahead leading to the price hikes.
Shoulder season: This often refers to Moderate Momentum travel as during this season the prices and demand are modest. This transitional period often lies between off-peak and peak seasons where one can see a gradual increase or decrease towards peak or off-peak seasons respectively.
Off-peak Season: The lowest demand in the seasonality calendar is the off-peak season, and hence the inventory pricing in the season remains low.
Travel Seasons Decoded: Navigating the New Ambiguity of Changing Seasonality
Gone are the jolly good days when people used to travel only by calendar dates. The blurring lines of seasonality types have posed ambiguity in the traveling patterns of individuals. The Off-peak season has started behaving in a very different way nowadays. People are increasingly traveling during off-peak seasons for several reasons besides business travel. Reasons like:
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Bleisure travel: Mixing business plus leisure where travelers extend their stays or travel for leisure a little after their business proceedings are done. This creates a lot of uncertainty when tracking corporate consumer behavior, as the concept of Bleisure is still new.
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Global Events: Events (Sports, Art, Diplomatic, etc), Conventions, and much more persuade people to travel out of traditional seasons. This leads to unprecedented demand spikes out of nowhere, making them difficult to track.
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The rising concept of “workcations”, involves working remotely from a vacation destination, allowing individuals to explore new places in any season while maintaining work commitments.
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Off-peak tourism: Many people prefer to travel during the off-peak/shoulder seasons to capitalize on cheaper travel industry offerings (airfares, hotel room rates, etc) or to avoid large crowds.
Yatra.com noticed a 40-50% drop in airfares for popular routes like Delhi-Mumbai and Mumbai-Bangalore during the off-season in 2023. This motivates many to visit these places specifically in those seasons.
Ixigo observed a 50% drop in hotel room rates in popular tourist destinations like Goa and Kerala during the off-season in 2023. Low room rates at premium hotels and resorts in prominent tourist destinations are a very good deal in the eyes of the price-centric Indian consumer.
The blurring of peak, shoulder, and off-peak travel, with a considerable 20% increase in airfare searches for stay and travel in off-peak season is now the new norm of the Travel Industry.
All these reasons pose ambiguities in pricing airline industry offerings as traditional RMS are left puzzled finding ways to understand these emerging new trends every single day. Then how exactly are demand patterns behaving throughout the year right now?
Temporal Symphony: Harmonizing Travel Demands Before and After Peaks
The latest trend shows a different view on how airfare fluctuates throughout the year compared to what traditional systems in the market believe. We can see from the graph above that airline ticket prices do not follow an extreme rise and fall nature. Instead, there is a gradual increase or decrease surrounding peak seasons, indicating the rising demands in off-peak and shoulder seasons.
This is due to the metamorphosis in travel patterns of consumers resulting in Bleisure travel, Off-peak tourism, Global events, business travel, etc. These factors ensure that continual demand follows throughout the season. So even though peak season high demand goes away, these new-age seasonality trends ensure that the curve gradually eases into its lowest point throughout the off-peak season.
Now that seems like a lot to keep up with, right? How are carriers supposed to price their inventory when demand is dependent on so many ambiguities?
AirViaje.ai: Reshaping the Future of Travel by Solving Industry Woes
AirViaje.ai is your one-stop pricing intelligence solution to change how you price yourairline inventory for the better. We deliver more than just competition-based price points generated according to the same old seasonal charts. Our state-of-the-art pricing system can:
Optimise price points
on a real-time basis supported by brisk data flow which gives an accurate picture of the market’s performance every 15 minutes! Yes, you read that right.Considers new-age seasonality trends when generating price points to ensure no outdated strategies cause your potential revenue to flush down the drain.
Forecasts demand well in advance to help you strategize and allocate your inventory in an efficient and timely manner, avoiding last-minute hassles.
Effortless integrations with the existing Inventory Management Systems (IMS) to help you start gaining significant revenue right off the bat within a week.
We deliver a tension-free seamless experience for you to forget about market ambiguities while we take the wheel for you. Step into the future with AirViaje.ai’s dynamic pricing capabilities and push your outdated revenue management systems aside today!
We believe that stepping into the future requires reflecting on the past, stay tuned for next week’s blog to learn more about the evolution of Airline pricing strategies through the years.
Book a free demo of our automated retail solutions or contact our optimization experts at info@sciative.com.
To see how AirViaje.ai can empower your brand, ensuring it not only survives but thrives, visit sciative.com
