Content and data form an essential component of the airline industry, and the systems that are designed to accurately and safely manage that information – from distribution to storage – are receiving an increasing amount of attention.
“Aviation gets vast quantities of data from across its operational and value streams… But data’s power is in its accessibility, and this is where the industry needs to improve. We cannot continue to work on data in silos,” says Kim Macaulay, Iata’s Chief Information and Data Officer.
Under the Iata Data and Analytics Task Force, a team of experts comprising data scientists and engineers will assist Iata in the development and support of its core data functions. Technologies such as machine learning will also be deployed to ensure the implementation of a unified IT infrastructure that allows cross-sector data to be available.
“The point is that Iata understands the value of data, is a trusted airline partner in handling that data, and we can feed our learning throughout our industry services and products,” she says. “We will have more data than ever before, we will learn quickly, and just about every aspect of the industry stands to benefit from our work,” says Macaulay.
Five billion queries daily
During the Skift Aviation Forum held at the beginning of November, it was revealed in a survey conducted across executives from the hospitality and travel sector, that 60% of airline executives’ top priority for tech investments for the 2023/24 period is modernising legacy systems and harnessing the power of data.
Speaking on a panel held at the forum, Alex Zoghlin, President and CEO of the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) said its highest-ever daily change figures saw 5,6 billion changes made to its dataset. But an average of five billion queries are managed each day.
“We have more changes made to the data than customers ask questions, which is interesting. The volume is only going up and this is what is driving decisions,” says Zoghlin.
With ATPCO, airlines can make their inventory available with dynamic pricing in real time. Through its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), ATPCO has developed Clean Rooms to help airlines derive insights from shopping data.
Clean Rooms was announced in July “to truly light the path for airlines to further explore dynamically created offers”.
“With multiple airlines already providing their shopping data, including dynamically generated pricing, we are exploring the opportunities that the privacy-enhanced capabilities of AWS Clean Rooms provides, to generate rich pricing insights,” said Zoghlin following the launch.
“The increasing volume of data is becoming a key driver for decision-making. Collaboration and transparency, facilitated by data sharing, are crucial for maintaining the industry’s ability to serve customer needs,” says skift.com.
