COVID-19 caused an unprecedented downturn in the airline industry, with revenues plummeting by over 90% for the hardest-hit carriers. As airlines worked to restart operations and regain market share, the focus shifted to accelerating revenue recovery and optimizing pricing strategies.

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Our work centered on driving revenue growth for a Skytrax 3-star global airline, leveraging our deep airline expertise and familiarity with its data. By partnering with the airline’s revenue management, pricing, and ancillary teams, we rapidly developed 8-10 high-impact use cases aimed at uncovering new revenue opportunities.

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Using Alteryx, we built solutions that were easily understandable and repeatable for business users, ensuring that the airline could automate key processes, scale successful strategies, and continuously adapt to changing market conditions.

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An estimated $60-$65M in top line revenue generation

Change and Cancellations Reporting

Our team built a change and cancellation workflow that optimized policy-driven fare adjustments, identifying $50 million in ancillary revenue through automated analysis and process improvements.

Low-Cost Carrier Competitive Benchmarking

Our team developed a workflow to help the pricing team optimize fare strategies through weekly competitive analysis. By continuously evaluating and adjusting pricing based on low-cost carrier data, the team ensured a market advantage and generated $10-$15 million in revenue using this workflow.

Seat Change Reactivation Marketing Promotion

Our team developed a targeted seat upgrade promotion, sending personalized emails to encourage seat selection before check-in. We built a dynamic PNR list for automated outreach, with plans to scale across all routes and adjust pricing dynamically. On a single route, this strategy generated $500K annually.

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Over 1,600 hours saved in repeatable analysis & 90% reduction in manual effort

Enabling Code Sharing Compliance Process

Our team integrated internal pricing with ATPCO data to identify pricing discrepancies with partner airlines, saving 16 hours per week and reducing manual effort by 98%.

Upgrade Bidding System Revenue Optimization

Our team automated the fare upgrade bidding process, integrating Plusgrade data with internal sources to create a centralized truth table for analysis. By applying business rules and enabling rapid market reaction insights, we helped optimize bid acceptance, generating an additional $0.06 per passenger flown. This saved 208 analyst hours annually (~66% reduction) and produced $92K in revenue in one month alone.

Change and Cancellations Reporting: Turning No-Shows into Dough

The Ancillary Team is responsible for generating revenue from non-ticket sources, including baggage fees, onboard services, and change/cancellation fees, which account for $40M to $50M annually. However, there is currently no oversight or structured reporting on change and cancellation trends, limiting the team's ability to optimize this revenue stream.

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During COVID-19, free changes and cancellations were introduced to enhance customer experience, deprioritizing revenue analysis. As a result, the Ancillaries Team has never had a dedicated report on change and cancellation behaviors—only a high-level financial summary from Finance. Without granular insights, the team is unable to answer critical questions, such as:

• When do passengers typically cancel their flights before departure?
• What is the optimal cutoff for full refunds or adjusted fees?
• How can fees be dynamically adjusted based on route, class, or other parameters?

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To address this, we developed an initial reporting process that provides monthly or ad hoc insights, allowing the team to analyze key trends and collect feedback. The next step is to evolve this into a dynamic dashboard, enabling real-time monitoring and scenario analysis. Ultimately, these insights will support a business case to leadership for strategic policy adjustments, unlocking additional revenue while balancing customer experience.

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Flying High with Competitive Benchmarking: Outpacing Low-Cost Carriers

The Pricing Team conducts a weekly competitive pricing analysis to ensure pricing remains aligned with low-cost carrier data and maintains market competitiveness. The process involves aggregating Infare pricing data, comparing it with internal pricing, and applying strategic adjustments.

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Previously, this process took 1-2 business days, relying on 3-4 manually executed Python scripts to extract data. While these scripts pulled the necessary information, pricing analysis and adjustments still required manual execution by an analyst.

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With the implementation of an Alteryx workflow, the process now runs in just 45 minutes. The workflow automates data extraction, generating structured tables for faster manual analysis. Additionally, the Pricing Team now has a historical internal database tracking low-cost carrier pricing trends over time, providing deeper insights for future pricing strategies.

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Looking ahead, the next phase of automation will introduce a recommendation engine within Alteryx that integrates Infare data, historical pricing, and internal pricing strategies. This enhancement will eliminate the need for manual analysis, enabling daily automated recommendations for pricing adjustments.

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With this automation, the team has saved 14 hours per week, reducing manual effort by 94%. The next phase of the solution will further cut processing time by 50% through automated pricing recommendations, eliminating the need for manual route analysis. These enhancements are expected to generate $10M-$15M in additional annual top-line revenue from the domestic market.

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Seat Change Reactivation Marketing Promotion

The Marketing Team launched an experimental promotion targeting passengers who had not selected a seat before check-in, encouraging them to opt in for a seat change via personalized email campaigns. These emails either offered a price reduction or served as a reminder to upgrade.

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To execute this campaign, a dynamic PNR list was generated, including key customer details and segmentation by fare bundles. The process provided insights into:

• Who has not opted for a seat change?
• When are seat changes most frequently booked?
• What are the customer profiles most likely to convert?

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The goal is to expand this approach across all flight routes and dynamically adjust seat change pricing based on conversion rates and customer behavior. While this process was never done before, early results indicate an additional $500K in annual revenue from a single route, highlighting its potential for scalable revenue growth.

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Bidding for Success: Cashing In on Upgrades

Our team streamlined the fare upgrade bidding process by automating manual workflows and integrating Plusgrade data with internal sources. Previously, analysts manually extracted bid details, built pivot tables, and made subjective decisions on which offers to accept or reject—a process that lacked intelligence and forecasting capabilities.

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With the current automated solution, an Alteryx workflow aggregates Plusgrade data, applies business rules, and generates a structured dataset for faster and more informed decision-making. This has eliminated 66% of manual effort, reducing processing time from 6 hours to 2 hours per week, saving 208 hours annually.

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The next phase will replace manual decision-making with a forecasting model, allowing the system to provide data-driven recommendations based on historical trends and real-time bidding data. By optimizing pricing variables and bid acceptance strategies, the process has already generated $92K in additional revenue in May alone and is expected to scale further across routes.

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Code Sharing Compliance: Cracking the Code

Our team automated the codeshare pricing compliance process, ensuring pricing consistency across all partnered routes. Previously, analysts manually generated time-consuming ad hoc reports to identify discrepancies between partner fares and internal pricing, making it difficult to scale as new partnerships were added.

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With the current solution, an Alteryx workflow automatically extracts fare data from all partners and flags pricing mismatches, reducing manual effort by 98%. The process that once took 16 hours now runs in just 10 seconds.

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The next phase will expand the solution to ensure full compliance across all their airline partners, with daily automated validation to support a growing partner network.