In today’s increasingly digital age, the travel industry has witnessed a significant transformation with the advent of online travel agencies (OTAs). These platforms have become a go-to destination for travellers seeking convenient and cost-effective travel options.
However, there’s a lesser-known issue that cripples the airline industry– the sudden disappearance of airline inventories from OTA platforms.
This phenomenon raises questions about why it happens and how it impacts both the airlines and their potential revenues.
Importance of Visibility
The person sitting over the screen will be replaced by a flight, remove both other people.
Picture yourself in the shoes of a seller in an extremely competitive marketplace, where lots of customers are walking around. Your stall along with your products neatly displayed is set up, but it’s as if people can’t see it. They’re passing by without noticing what you’re selling. Even though you have exactly what they’re looking for, you’re invisible to them. And you have no way of knowing why this is happening. This means you’re losing out money from all sides, putting up the stall is a costly affair and you are not even generating the revenue. Imagine how frustrating and challenging this is for you and your business. Let’s elaborate more on why invisibility and presence of flights on online platforms is important.
Better possibility of earnings: OTAs are widely used by travellers to search for and book flights. By listing their flights on these platforms, airlines can increase their visibility to a diverse audience of potential customers.
Market Reach: OTAs often have a global reach, allowing airlines to tap into markets they might not reach through their own websites or marketing. This is particularly valuable for airlines that operate internationally.
Competition: The airline industry is highly competitive. By listing on OTAs, airlines can compete with other carriers for the attention of customers. And if they are absent from these platforms, essentially being absent from the market altogether, the income possibilities fall into the competitor’s lap instead.
Customer Convenience: Most travellers prefer the convenience of using OTAs to compare multiple flight options, schedules, and prices in one place. By listing their flights on these websites, airlines make it easier for potential customers to find and book their services.
For airlines, business’s visibility is its only possibility of income. Flights have humongous costs of operations already and if their inventories disappear from the platforms, without them knowing, they have no way of earning any money.
The Vanishing Act
Let’s first delve into why the vanishing of flights occurs on the OTA platforms, and what impact it holds.
The inventories can disappear from the online platforms for a number of reasons. Some of the most frequent reasons for this act are:
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Limited Inventory: Airlines allocate a certain number of seats to different distribution channels. Once these seats are sold out, the flight may no longer appear on the platforms.
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Scheduled Updates: OTA platforms regularly update their flight information to ensure absolute accuracy. During these updates, flights may shortly disappear as the system refreshes and retrieves the most up-to-date information from airlines.
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Technical Glitches: Technical issues can occasionally cause flights to disappear temporarily from OTA platforms. This can include server problems, data synchronization errors, or software bugs. These glitches can happen from, both, the OTA’s end as well as the airline’s end.
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Flight Cancellations: If a flight is cancelled by the airline, it will no longer be available for booking on OTA platforms for the passengers to book.
Final Impact on Airlines
The disappearance of airline inventories from OTA platforms can have significant consequences for the airlines themselves:
Loss of Revenue: When a flight vanishes from OTA platforms, airlines miss out on potential bookings. This loss can be particularly painful during peak travel seasons or when airlines are trying to fill seats on less popular routes. Reduced Visibility: OTAs are essential marketing channels for airlines. When an airline’s inventory is not visible on these platforms, it loses valuable exposure to a vast customer base, making it harder to compete with other carriers. Customer Dissatisfaction: Travellers often rely on OTAs for their convenience and comprehensive flight options. When flights disappear, it can lead to customer frustration and damage the airline’s reputation. Pressure on Direct Sales: Airlines may be forced to direct customers to their own websites or reservation systems, incurring higher marketing and operational costs
Viaje Air’s Elegant Solutions:
If you are in airlines, you must be well aware that these disappearances happen a lot. While these might be an issue from your end or the platform’s end, at the end – it impacts YOUR revenues. Now, these issues cannot always be avoided but it is necessary to have precaution and backup. That’s exactly where we, Viaje Air, come in.
Imagine if you could find out about every platform from where your inventories vanished – at the click on a button. You not only know where you disappeared from, but also the time it happened.
Apart from these sophisticated benefits, Viaje Air also lets you know the SRP Positions of your flights on the OTA platforms, and the prices at which your inventories have been listed on the online platforms to avoid all pricing disparities.
Viaje provides you with all the information & tools you didn’t know you needed – to price absolutely right, always.
Envision the amount of significance this holds, and how it is the key to your treasure.
To keep up with this dynamic environment, it is imperative to learn how AI pricing engines can help you do that.
Book a free demo of our automated retail solutions or contact our optimization experts at info@sciative.com.
To learn more about our AI-powered dynamic pricing tool VIAJE.ai, reach out to us.
