Amadeus invests in start-up FLYR to help travellers lock the price of flight tickets before booking

How many times have you found a flight ticket with a great price and the next time you look for it, the price has increased? Imagine you could lock the ticket price and protect it from further increases to buy yourself more time to organise your trip before you’re ready to complete your booking.  

 

FLYR’s FareKeep® allows travellers to do just that. While searching for fares through an Online Travel Agency (OTA), metasearch site or airline website, FareKeep gives travellers the option to hold a specific fare and protect it from increases for a small fee. With machine learning and algorithms inspired by the financial services industry, FLYR helps OTAs, metasearch and airline sites to dynamically price the fee for holding a fare based on how likely it is that a price may change.

  

Logitravel is one of the early adopters of FLYR’s technology and has already implemented the FareKeep solution in its platform in Spain and Portugal.  

 

“Our goal is to bring value to our customers by offering them the services that fulfil their needs and make for a better user experience, which helps us build customer loyalty. With FareKeep, we are able to offer more flexibility to travellers and engage with them in new and different ways during the fare lock to bring more value to them and boost the chances of conversion”, says Tomeu Bennasar, CEO, Logitravel.

 

FLYR has found that out of 100 fare locks, up to 30% are converted into a booking, representing a significant opportunity for travel sellers and airlines to increase revenues as well as reduce the cost of finding new customers. 

 

“Simple and consumer-focused shopping experiences are borne from innovative breakthroughs like FareKeep. As an online traveller, being able to lock a given fare reduces uncertainty and buys travellers time to think. For airlines, this ultimately translates into a higher probability of the consumer purchasing the flight with that specific airline, at no extra cost. FareKeep reduces the overall cost of customer acquisition and is a great addition to our offer,” says Gianni Pisanello, Strategic Marketing Director, Airline Distribution Marketing.

 

At the same time, once a traveller has protected a ticket price, the travel seller can open a qualified and ongoing relationship with that traveller, making it more likely that the traveller will go on to complete his or her booking. This, in turn, increases sales generation potential for the airline whose fare has been held by the traveller, without any impact on their inventory.