SAS Completes Migration to Amadeus Altéa Revenue Management Suite

SAS has completed its migration to Amadeus Altéa Revenue Management Suite.

As a response to competition from low cost carriers and transparent price-comparison tools, full-service airlines are increasingly adopting multiple flexible fare structures.

This business strategy challenges legacy revenue management systems, which forecast an increase in demand in low price booking classes and a decrease in high profit classes. This results in an inaccurate picture of consumer demand, as systems cannot adequately understand travellers that buy low price flight tickets, but still expect optional extras to add to their flight ticket.

The Amadeus Altéa Revenue Management Suite has been designed to overcome this phenomenon, known as the ‘buy-down effect’, which is one of the single biggest lost revenue opportunities for network airlines today.

Tobias Jönsson, VP Revenue Management at SAS said, “Today, network airlines are suffering with complex revenue management IT solutions and the ‘buy-down effect’ when it comes to taking control of revenue. However, we are excited to be working with Amadeus on a solution which tackles these issues and is fully integrated with our other Altéa systems ... Our migration to Amadeus Altéa Revenue Management was completed seamlessly and lays the foundation for us to optimise the pricing of both flight and, in the future, ancillary services.”

The migration follows a long-term strategic partnership between Amadeus and Scandinavian Airlines, signed in 2013, under which a groundbreaking ‘Centre of Competence’ was established. The agreement saw more than 20 SAS employees, many of whom were experts in the field of revenue management, join Amadeus to pave the way for future innovation that can benefit the entire Altéa community.

Julia Sattel, VP of Airline IT, Amadeus, said, “Amadeus is ideally placed to deliver this unique revenue management solution due to our ability to use more accurate and complete data drawn from the Amadeus Altéa Suite, various other Amadeus and external sources, and a wide range of accurate, real time data from the airline itself. The end-to-end nature of the approach enables greater automation and means SAS will now be able to correctly price relevant offers for travellers, automatically registering when travellers are also purchasing ancillary services. This solution will support our vision for a truly traveller-centric global travel ecosystem.”