This is a time of tremendous change for our industry – and British Airways is playing its part in the transformation.
We have begun a journey to transform our airline, for our people and for our customers, underpinned by an investment of£7 billion over the next two years .
Supporting the change is an overhaul of our technological foundations.
We are investing £750 million in our IT infrastructure, moving 700 systems and thousands of servers to the cloud by early next year. We are also investing heavily in the development of a new ba.com website and app and are laser focused on transforming our business and fixing any pain points for our customers.
A key element of this program is the implementation of a new revenue management solution calledNetwork Revenue Management (NRM) from our partners at Amadeus.
It is this transition I would like to explore a little below.
Selecting a partner
Earlier this year,we selected Amadeus to help us on the path to modern retailing and the use of Offers and Orders with the deployment of Amadeus Nevio.
Together we will be able to create highly relevant customer offers, and deliver a best-in-class retailing and servicing experience for customers.
A new revenue management solution is a major milestone in this journey, helping us to take full advantage of the changing retailing landscape.
So, why Amadeus?
In a joint Solutions Centre, our teams work alongside Amadeus’ teams who are dedicated to this project, to collaboratively evolve NRM features and co-design new revenue management capabilities that allow our airline to best optimise decision-making.
By combining competencies, experts are able to drive excellence across the revenue management, data science and pricing areas to ensure we reach our commercial potential.
We understand this will fundamentally change our business, which is why the business transformation consulting support from Amadeus was an important factor in the decision-making process at the earliest stages of the project.
Together, we will accelerate the transition to the new revenue management systems, build a new culture and prepare our teams for commercial success as a true retailer.
Thanks to Data as a Service (DaaS) capabilities from Amadeus, our analysts will be able to easily access ready-to-use data, via a new co-designed user-interface, improving commercial decision making.
In addition, DaaS give us efficient and easy cloud sharing to ensure revenue management data is usable by our data scientists alongside our wider airline information.
Future-proofing revenue management
With these advantages established, what might the future of our revenue management look like?
NRM manages the relationship between price, demand, and capacity, through pricing and inventory control. It helps us extract the most value out of the products that we offer for sale in the marketplace.
It uses historical and live sales data from our airline, as well as market-wide public information, to understand how, when, and why our customers choose to fly with British Airways.
Through advanced analytical models, NRM translates that market knowledge into actionable pricing recommendations for each British Airways itinerary and ancillary product.
Moreover, NRM forecasts and optimises demand at an origin and destination (O&D) level, moving us away from a scenario based on controls on individual legs of a flight (also known as ’segments’).
This more comprehensive approach will be vital to building personalised experiences, since we will better know when and where our customers want to fly and what services will enhance their journey along the way.
These insights will be presented in a modern interface, offering a unique user experience for our teams. This ease-of-use will allow us to automate many processes which can be manually intensive, freeing teams to focus on other areas.
A wider landscape
Eventually, NRM lays a foundation toward ‘classless’ revenue management capabilities for the Offer and Order world, where we will need to understand the true value of each diverse flight and ancillary product without reference to a fixed set of pre-defined price points or products.
To achieve this, innovative technologies such as Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence will also power the solution to refine the recommendations.
In parallel, we are working to expand the definition of revenue management, moving away from a model based simply on the availability on flights, to one where we are able to price all British Airways’ products, including ancillaries.
We are excited to work alongside the data science teams at Amadeus to keep on utilising and intensifying the use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance our various models.
Our Chief Commercial Officer, Colm Lacy, sees NRM as a key part of British Airways journey to becoming a true retailer. Through our wider Commercial Transformation and our collaboration with Amadeus on Nevio, we are proud to be playing a key role in moving the industry forward into an Offer and Order-based world.
This transformation means we will be able to create unique offers for our passengers that are efficiently priced, based on their true market value, and made available in the right place, at the right time.
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