Oman Air takes control of fare management with SITA’s Airfare Insight solution

Oman Air becomes the fifth major carrier in the Middle East to adopt SITA’s breakthrough software solution for fares management, Airfare Insight, in a seven-year contract announced today.

The new system analyses fares and manages the workflow across multiple departments - revenue management, sales, and outsourced pricing distribution - to ensure the right fares are distributed at the right time, to the right customer.

Peter Hill, Oman Air CEO, said: “Oman Air always wants its customers to have the best value air fares and with the Airfare Insight solution we will be able to optimise our fare offerings within the same selling day. We will have an informed view on what our competitors are doing and be able to make real-time decisions on pricing and adjust our offerings to make the best fares available through any distribution channel.”

Specifically, Oman Air expects increased revenue due to improved process flows and better response times to market information; increased revenue recovery due to centralization of all fares data and better ticket auditing; increased speed to market due to consolidation of all fare workflow; and increased accuracy of fares data due to implementation of an automated feed and fare upload, eliminating manual entries and the possibility of costly errors.

Hani El Assaad, SITA Regional Vice President Middle East and North Africa, said: “Independent research has shown that if prices are not competitive, a company loses 3% to 10% of revenue. Some of our customers have been able to pay for the entire Airfare Insight project within a month due to the scale of revenue re-capture. Airfare Insight is a cutting-edge software tool and it will be configured precisely to meet Oman Air’s needs.”

Almost 100 million fares are published worldwide at any one time, and an airline will typically update fares throughout its distribution network of GDSs, travel agencies and websites, several times a day.

SITA, the air transport IT specialist, developed Airfare Insight as part of its Horizon passenger management and distribution portfolio, to provide airlines with the integrated capability to manage and control the complexity of end-to-end fares management and distribution processes.