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Building a more sustainable travel industry is a journey, one driven by collaboration, innovation and a willingness to encourage change across the whole sector. There is unlikely to be a ‘big bang’ moment, where fully formed solutions arrive, and the process will instead take the form of countless incremental improvements over the coming years.
Today, I would like to share a little insight into the work of one Amadeus partner, offering a practical solution to help mitigate the environmental impact of travel -Volantio .
Amadeus Ventures has twice invested in this United States-based innovator, which works to free airlines from the constraints of fixed aircraft capacity. Volantio helps carriers fly more passengers without flying more aircraft, optimizing capacity and revenue, improving customer satisfaction and bottom-line results and with the effect of rationalizing CO2 emissions per pax flown.
In a nutshell, Volantio's solution enables airlines to create a private resale marketplace where carriers can reach out to passengers on peak flights and make them an offer to “resell” their seat back to the airline for an incentive (such as loyalty points, travel vouchers, ancillary benefits, or upgrades), and a seat on a flight that was not projected to depart full.
The process is entirely voluntary and guided by machine learning to maximize profitability for airlines and improve the experience for travelers, who benefit by flying on a less busy flight and receiving an unexpected benefit. The airline is then able to fly an additional passenger on the peak flight.
The platform is also completely automated, from passenger identification, to offer creation and sending, to rebooking, and incentive fulfillment, reducing workload for airline IT teams.
More sustainable travel
So far, so good. Let's take a deeper dive into how this relates to building a more sustainable travel industry.
At its core, the solution from Volantio enables airlines to carry more passengers without flying more aircraft. That means, the platform can help drive higher load factors, better matching demand to an airline’s existing flight capacity, by moving passengers from peak flights to less in-demand off-peak ones. A higher load factor means each aircraft is better utilized so the airline maximizes the number of passengers transported for the fuel it burns.
Another way of thinking about it is; each empty seat on an aircraft represents a higher inefficiency in terms of fuel burned per passenger km. By smoothing demand across an airline’s flights, Volantio reduces empty seats, rationalizing the average net carbon emission for each passenger flown.
Let’s look at some numbers
Volantio offers some hypothetical numbers to support its case.
Volantio's analysis shows that for an airline with aircraft able to hold 160 passengers, carrying 10M passengers each year and with an average load factor of 85%, there is potential to reallocate somewhere between 10,000 and 13,000 passengers to less busy flights over the course of the year. This then offers the possibility for the same amount of people to fly on high demand flights, increasing load factors but not CO2 emissions per passenger.
Imagine now that this technology is adopted and deployed widely – this is a solution that meets growing demand without growing emissions. Relying on pre-pandemic numbers on a global scale, with 4.5 billion passengers yearly and an average load factor of 85%, there is potentially around 1 billion empty seats to grab before adding extra capacity, hence extra emissions.
At Amadeus, in 2022, our airline IT solutions were used by airlines to board more than 1.5 billion passengers last year , highlighting the scale of the opportunity. Small changes can make a significant impact.
Incremental benefits
Small, incremental steps such as this one are key in the transformation to become a more sustainable travel industry. Volantio is playing its part by offering a way to improve load factors and rationalize the CO2 impact of each passenger, while contributing to airlines’ bottom-line.
By pre-integrating Volantio, Amadeus has reduced the timelines required for Altéa customers to activate Volantio’s platform from years to months.
Innovative companies such as these are vital to Amadeus’ efforts to support building a more sustainable industry and we are delighted to showcase the important work they do.
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