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As the trip is overhauled, the airlines guess by plane

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Before, air travel he had certain rhythms. Business travelers flew on Monday mornings and returned on Thursday afternoons, filling up with more expensive seats. Come summer, leisure travelers took to the skies. Crowds flocked to Thanksgiving, Labor Day and Christmas, and to specific destinations for events — sports tournaments, music festivals, fashion weeks. Decades of historical data incorporated into complex mathematical models helped airlines determine schedules and prices.

Then came the pandemic. “All history, all ancient practices airlines it used to have to be thrown out the window to decide what to fly and what price to charge, ”says Jim Barlow, vice president of strategic consulting for Amadeus, which builds software for companies.

Now that more passengers are embedded and ready to travel, the airline industry is seeing green shoots. More than 2.1 million people traveled through U.S. airport security checks on July 5, nearly twice as many as last year; but that was 20 percent less than in 2019.

This does not mean that the photos created by the company’s algorithms are clearer. Airlines are working with less data and more uncertainty than usual, creating a complicated math problem. It’s not just about knowing where people want to go and how much they will pay. It is also making sure that the right size aircraft and the rest of the crew are in the right place to take off. They have found other ways to deal with the small numbers that run their systems.

About six months into the pandemic, many companies relied on their algorithms and relied on human programming and pricing groups to get people where they wanted to go, Barlow says. They froze the hiring and it laid off thousands of workers. Some store planes, and photos of Delta and Southwestern planes Parked in the California desert it became a horrible sign of pandemic times.

Part of the problem was that customers had changed and continued to change. The process of fixing the plane is one of the most difficult in the business world. Passengers on the same flight, and even in very similar seats, often pay different prices, where they bought tickets and when. Indoor groups create pricing structures and schedules when passengers are likely to purchase tickets. Holidays, which are looking for deals, tend to be bought early, which is why companies offer the lowest prices on pre-purchased tickets. Business travelers, on the other hand, buy closer to the time of the flight and are willing to pay more.

Since the pandemic occurred in early 2020, most people who fly have been quiet. And they were booking the trip closer than usual than usual, probably because they did not know how the coronavirus would affect their planet.

The abundance of holiday brochures has changed airlines ’schedules, and they have appeared willing to experiment with less traveled routes. Last year, JetBlue added routes to the Caribbean. United introduced uninterrupted flights to Florida and its popular home holiday destinations. As business travel continued to fall, airlines flew away from large traditional sites to land routes: from Milwaukee to Las Vegas; Boise, Idaho, New York; Des Moines Portlandera, Oregonera.

As routing experiments progress, airlines and those building price systems are testing other data sources to make better operational decisions. Customer web searches and online notification requests are being used to clarify what is being requested. Did a bunch of people sign up for notifications of cheap flights to Vegas in November? Maybe the airlines should schedule some extra flights that month. In the future, Barlow says, airlines expect to integrate other sources of information into their operations, such as mobile phone data, which show how complete competitors ’flights are in real time.

“Dynamic pricing” – targeting specific tariffs to specific people based on their history and real-time market conditions – has also risen during the pandemic as airlines mimic e-commerce companies by changing prices according to direct demand. Since the 1980s, airlines have changed their seat prices according to well-ordered schemes, selling ticket blocks at pre-determined prices. But dynamic-priced tickets can change all the time. For airlines, it’s a holy grail, as it promises to almost predict the prices customers are willing to pay. Studies show that more accurate prices include not only seats, but also meals and extra legroom, which can increase incomes by 5 to 15 percent.

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