PROS Introduces Innovative Real-Time Group Booking Solution for Airlines

PROS®

, a big data software company, today launched PROS Group Sales Optimizer (GSO), a new solution that enables airlines and their customers to book group travel in real-time. PROS GSO includes dynamic pricing integrated with sales effectiveness, revenue management and contract management. GSO builds upon the dynamic pricing capability of PROS Group Tool, introduced in 2013. PROS GSO uses predictive and prescriptive pricing and analytics, providing airlines with a broad range of automated flight and customer-centric pricing options that reduce carrier service costs and maximize the likelihood of purchase. Group reservations typically require multiple layers of approval, creating customer booking delays of up to a week or more. PROS GSO provides airlines and their travel agents with a fast, easy and automated process for booking group travel, and also makes real-time dynamic pricing for groups as easy as making individual travel arrangements. "Across today's travel landscape, airlines are looking for new ways to improve sales effectiveness for their travel agent customers. Carriers want to increase customer satisfaction and retention, while maximizing the revenue contribution from group business,” said PROS Travel President Benson Yuen. “PROS GSO enables carriers to significantly streamline the group booking process. It provides multiple customer- and flight-attribute driven offers, increasing the likelihood of purchase, while reducing the turnaround time to close the deal. By presenting a tailored offer to the customer, group travel reservations can be accomplished in minutes rather than days, offering airlines another PROS solution to help them outperform.” PROS GSO enables airlines and their travel agent customers to increase group travel closure rates and improve the customer experience: Airlines can create easier, faster booking experiences for their customers. The complexity of booking group travel is a common phenomenon among airlines, which requires customers to wait up to a week to complete reservations. PROS GSO real-time booking allows reservations to be completed in minutes instead of days, and customers receive instant fare options with a range of prices and flight times. PROS GSO automates group bookings and effectively mirrors the individual ticket-purchase experience, placing choices directly in the customers' hands and enabling airlines to recognize revenue more quickly. PROS GSO provides carriers with predictive and prescriptive pricing for increasing deal closures. Airlines today often rely on static price points for group sales quotes, resulting in missed opportunities and lost revenue. PROS GSO dynamic pricing combines insights from the group customer's CRM solution, provides fare calculations based on real-time market conditions and previous purchasing behavior, and avoids arbitrary, static price points. As group customer requirements change – including travel dates, ticket quantities or destinations – PROS GSO quickly adjusts to offer the best options available. Airlines support seamless buying experiences for multiple channels. The inefficient group travel booking process for airlines – typically made via phone or various complicated systems – wastes time and results in lost revenue. With PROS GSO, travel agents, airline sales representatives and revenue management analysts can use a simple centralized application, allowing access to all relevant information, including group ticket history. With greater operational efficiency, airlines can increase the likelihood of customer purchases with automation that reduces service costs. Automatic contracts speed booking options. Airlines today require a series of time-consuming, labor-intensive tasks to generate group travel contracts. With PROS GSO, contracts are automatically generated for group reservations – including pre-defined terms and conditions – which accelerate the booking process. Travel agents gain the flexibility of confirming passenger names at their convenience, rather than at the time of booking, enabling the airline to capture revenue more quickly. To learn more about the PROS Group Sales Optimizer solution, visit the website. PROS publicly demonstrated this solution at the PROS Outperform Travel 2014 conference, Oct. 7-9, in Houston.