Anchored Search and Two-Step Shopping in Airline Distribution: Enhancing Fare Integrity and System Performance

Abstract

Airline distribution has experienced a paradigm shift from static fare filings to dynamic offer optimization, making the integrity of fares and the performance of multi-leg shopping journeys challenging to achieve. Classic round-trip pricing systems assess all potential paths between the return legs in parallel, making calculations excessively computationally intensive, causing failed fares and screen PNR errors. Anchored search and shopping solutions to these systemic problems have implemented one-way dependencies between the fares assessed for each phase, where the outbound leg is priced first to set up the anchor with frozen business attributes such as fare brand, class, and combinability logic. Potential return fares are then assessed on the condition that they are exclusively consistent with the pre-set anchor, making the paths fully compatible. This approach makes the pricing problem complexity switch from the original exponential to the new linear problem, making the solution less costly and more efficient while producing deterministic fares. On the commercial front, the solution helps improve conversion efficiency by removing the problem of price mismatching, helps improve the confidence level of distribution partners by making the fares more predictable, and allows the company to lock its revenue by blocking the use of incompatible fares. Additionally, the solution allows for the provision of customer-focused retailing by retaining the customer's intent signals throughout, hence allowing the construction of relevant offers, including target-related bundling, facilitating revenue optimization.