Boost your airline revenues through accurate agency sales insights

These days, the airline industry can be unpredictable, but that can’t stop you from doing business. Airline revenues depend on a lot of moving pieces, and aligning those pieces is the first step towards increasing sales, and in turn, revenues. We all know the challenges that your airline is facing in today’s new reality:

• Indirect sales now stand at 55% of all sales, having overtaken direct sales revenue. Indirect sales can be complex, but we must understand them since they are a main source of revenue.
• There is increasing competition from TMCs and Online Travel Agencies, and these channels need to be managed effectively to capture revenue.
• The distribution landscape is constantly changing, with demand diversifying and new revenue streams popping up (such as ancillaries). We need to be able to make better predictions and anticipate trends instead of playing catch-up.

Due to these factors, your airline’s commercial strategy is more important than ever. It is one of the only ways to organize all the different elements and achieve growth. With Accelya’s Channel Management capabilities, you will now be able to take advantage of a new end-to-end solution all on one platform to manage the industry challenges affecting your airline, especially those important agency insights.

In order to understand which agencies are bringing the most value to your commercial strategy, you need accurate insights. But it’s never that simple, is it?

Difficulties in Achieving Accurate Insights

The Sales and Finance departments know the challenges that come along with evaluating sales channels and agency partners.

Financial Aspects

Many of the problems seem to come down to money. There is always a need for greater visibility of your airline agency channels’ financial aspects. You need to define the framework for initiatives and incentive contracts, find the best way to allocate your budget, identify opportunities for growth, plus control costs while counting on a high ROI.

Data and Tools

It happens time and time again – the finance department is stuck manually inputting data using various tools and platforms. With all the information in different places, it’s a difficult task to understand and interpret numbers, or even find your results. This means that achieving accurate insights can be tough. In order to succeed, you need concrete, easily consumable feedback on indicators like yield, traffic, and cost of sales.

Agency Management & Monitoring

Although business can oftentimes come down to numbers, the most successful airline managers know that real success lies in your relationships within internal departments and external partners. You need to be able to have complete visibility of your agencies, including their performance, initiatives, trends, and history – and all of this with ease, without having to switch between platforms and navigate different systems.

How the Accelya Channel Management Capabilities Work

Our solution offers sales analytics, real-time information about markets, agencies, route performance and the potential that they could reach. It highlights the agencies that can bring you the most sales growth and makes recommendations for incentives and contracts, giving your airline more negotiating power. Better yet, it’s all available on a single, easy to use platform. Let’s breakdown the details:

The Accelya Channel Management Capabilities give you a complete view of each account that you’re interested in. It can use any data sources related to the agency channel for insights and performance monitoring. This will help you better identify your non-performing areas and growth opportunities. With actionable insights that you can act on immediately, you can ensure expected returns from the agency channel.

The platform looks at an agency’s past history and performance, as well as their market share and potential. It can simulate incentive contracts and deals, and easily deploy common incentive strategies for similar groups of similar around based on certain variables or categories. With so much data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to easily keep track of your most important KPIs and take the appropriate action to achieve your desired results.

Boosting You Airline’s Agency Sales with Insights

As Chief Commercial Officer or Head of Sales, your job is all about boosting sales and increasing revenue. Fortunately, accurate insights through the Accelya platform will give your airline more leverage when it comes to negotiating with agencies.

Backed by Accelya’s agency insights, you’ll be able to discuss performance metrics in agency and contract negotiations, including incentives, targets, sales potential, and more. For agencies that are behind on their targets, you’ll be able to define alternative actions in case of a lack of expected returns, meaning you’ll have an optimized ROI no matter what.

We have found that the Accelya Channel Management capabilities allows for revenue growth of up to 10% year-on-year, as well as an increase of market share of 1%. Your airline will also be able to reduce commissions by up to 20%. The numbers speak for themselves!

Conclusion

Your bottom line is exactly that, the bottom line of your airline’s financials. In order to sees sales growth and increased revenues, you must have a well-defined commercial strategy that solves the problems facing the modern airline industry. With the Accelya Channel Management Solution, you can properly manage indirect sales channels from TMCs and OTAs, plus identify your new investment areas that are seeing the most growth. Your commercial strategy will boost sales and generate a higher ROI in no time.

You’re already aware that our platform enables functionalities across each step of the channel management cycle, from strategy definition thanks to market recommendations and valuable insights for segmentation and target setting. But the best thing about Accelya’s Channel Management capabilities is that they’re constantly evolving to fit your airline’s needs. Our expert team is planning releases of additional functionalities around contract recommendations, modeling, and simulations; collaborative workflow-based contract finalization; an agency reporting portal; and more!

The Accelya Channel Management capabilities are already being used by more than 70 airlines and 6,000 travel agencies. Will you join them?

Learn  3 ways to manage airline indirect sales channels with efficiency and precision

If you liked this post you may want to learn more about Airline Commercial Solutions