As passenger demand steadily reaches pre-COVID levels, airlines must refocus on their commercial strategy to maintain optimum cash flow and boost ticket sales.
To meet your objectives, you must start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Which routes are driving ticket sales?
- Which travel partners are at the forefront, driving sales?
- Am I working with these travel partners that are driving sales? If yes, how do I leverage my relationship with them?
- How can I provide incentives to my travel partners with minimal effort and cost?
In this article, we will share three ways to leverage the power of your sales tools – to secure cash and boost ticket sales.
Let’s look at what this means for you:
1. Identify growth markets
Sales intelligence on present and upcoming flight periods can help you identify growth opportunities & gaps in the market. When tracked regularly, industry statistics can ensure that you understand market demand and trends and adapt quickly. Which routes and segments of travel (leisure or business) are in demand? What average fares is the demand highest at?
Such information is made available through Accelya’s Industry Insights tool. Over 75 airlines use this tool daily for sales analytics and to drive information-based sales and marketing actions.
2. Know your agents and their potential
The next step is to identify travel partners that will be the key participants in your journey toward growth.
- Who are the most active travel agencies?
- Which routes are they selling the most on?
- Am I engaging enough with key travel partners in my markets, and how effective are they for my airline?
Valuable information is critical to design an optimum sales engagement plan for your indirect channel. With Accelya’s tools, opportunity identification & incentive placement becomes easy.
That brings us to the final point in our article: How can you use incentives to stimulate demand most effectively and efficiently?
3. Incentivize right to stimulate demand
So, you have identified which travel partners can support your growth strategy. How can you encourage them to align with your growth strategy and to sell more?
The answer lies with the ‘Commission Management Tool’. It helps incentivize your travel partners’ sales actions, using specific ticketing criteria aligned with your sales objectives. The entire lifecycle of providing incentives to agencies – from filing deal conditions and calculating incentives to payment and reporting – is managed by Accelya. This is possible with no effort from your staff or travel partners, making it very easy to adopt and use.
Over 70 airlines use this approach to keep their travel partners motivated and engaged.
To learn more about our commercial tools and understand how they can drive your sales strategy, contact us for a live demo!