[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":65},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post-revenue-management-panel-at-WAF":3},{"id":4,"slug":5,"categories":6,"title":11,"excerpt":12,"date":13,"dateIso":14,"featuredOnProducts":15,"isFeatured":16,"author":17,"body":22,"mainImage":59,"thumbnail":62},"atYU_REAACsA4OP2","revenue-management-panel-at-WAF",[7],{"slug":8,"name":9,"subCategory":10},"travel-tech","Travel Tech","Industry Events","From the WAF 2026: Passengers book later. What that means for revenue management","","October 19, 2026","2026-10-19T00:00:00.000Z",[],false,{"name":18,"role":19,"bio":20,"avatar":21},"Marie Bonnefous","Communications Manager","Marie tells you the story of CitizenPlane: its history, its vision and its milestones","https:\u002F\u002Fimages.prismic.io\u002Fcitizenplane\u002FaYmKDORdVGd83vnj_marie-bonnefous.png?auto=format,compress",[23,26,28,31,33,35,37,39,41,43,45,47,49,51,53,55,57],{"type":24,"html":25},"paragraph","At World Aviation Festival last week, our Head of RM Strategy, Laurent Lebard, shared the stage with Łukasz Ponczek (Head of Revenue Management CEEME, LOT Polish Airlines), Greg Tarniowy (Revenue & Pricing, Arajet) and Henry Mooney (Commercial Director, Planitas). Sinead Finn, founder of affinnity, was moderating the panel around one question: what's shaping airline profitability today? ",{"type":24,"html":27},"Everyone agreed to say that passengers have changed how they buy, closer to departure, so most revenue teams have changed how they forecast. Here is a bit more about the discussion.",{"type":29,"html":30},"heading","Passengers wait longer, and they expect more",{"type":24,"html":32},"Booking early has a cost when the world feels uncertain, that's why more and more passengers wait longer before booking. Loyalty to the airline brand is thinning too. Passengers can book through the airline website, OTAs, aggregators and, soon, AI agents that compare every offer in seconds with no brand preference at all. ",{"type":24,"html":34},"For revenue teams, later booking means less time to react. When a flight drifted from its usual profile, there used to be weeks to correct course. Now the signal arrives late, and the hardest question an analyst answers every day gets harder: is this flight underperforming because the demand isn't there, or because the price is wrong?",{"type":29,"html":36},"Higher costs and refined strategies",{"type":24,"html":38},"Airline costs have gone up, so every seat has to earn more. The panel's answer was to push load factor and to segment the audience more finely.",{"type":24,"html":40},"The classic model sells one fare ladder to everyone. The model discussed on stage moves from one-to-all toward one-to-few, close to one-to-one: small groups of similar customers, or a single distribution channel, each with its own offer. On the same flight, an airline can raise prices for one group while running a targeted offer for another. The RM system's nesting logic has to allow for that.",{"type":24,"html":42},"Competitive pricing also needs refinement. Matching competition smartly means choosing competitor flights that matter. A 6am departure cannot be compared to a Friday 6pm flight. On a weak Tuesday evening flight where every sale counts, it might be. Smart matching also works upward: if a competitor raises fares while you are the cheapest, you can close part of the gap and still stay cheapest.",{"type":24,"html":44},"None of this should be decided once. Teams can test a move, watch how the flight responds and adjust. And fares are only part of the picture. Ancillaries such as bags, seats and branded fares let an airline keep a low entry fare to win the booking, then recover margin elsewhere.",{"type":29,"html":46},"Forecasting with this week's data, not only last year's",{"type":24,"html":48},"Historical booking profiles still matter, but they can't carry a forecast alone. Laurent's point was that \u003Cstrong>a good forecast combines past data with the speed of current sales\u003C\u002Fstrong>, and that the weight given to each should depend on context. In a stable season, history can lead. After a major geopolitical event, sales velocity should count for much more, because the results of the previous year are less relevant given the evolutive context. AI can help by flagging the news events that should shift those weights.",{"type":24,"html":50},"The second gap is \u003Cstrong>shopping demand\u003C\u002Fstrong>. Airlines know how many seats they sold on a flight. Few look closely at \u003Cstrong>how many people searched for that flight date on their own website, and how many of those searches turned into bookings.\u003C\u002Fstrong> Forecasting from searches and conversion rates gives an earlier read on demand than completed sales. It also helps answer the demand-or-price question.",{"type":29,"html":52},"More complexity shouldn't mean a black box",{"type":24,"html":54},"More data sources, shorter forecast cycles and finer segments make revenue management sharper. \u003Cstrong>They also make it harder to follow. The risk is a system that sets prices nobody can explain.\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"type":24,"html":56},"The panel was clear that \u003Cstrong>responding to complexity should not mean handing decisions to a black box. \u003C\u002Fstrong>AI can help to work the other way: an analyst asks why the system recommends a fare and gets the logic behind it, which inputs moved and by how much. For airlines under 10M passengers, where RM teams are small and each analyst covers many routes, that transparency is what makes automation possible to use.",{"type":24,"html":58},"That is the bar we hold ourselves to with Pulse RM: react fast to demand, and always let the analyst see why. \u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.citizenplane.com\u002Fproducts\u002Fpulse\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Learn more about Pulse\u003C\u002Fa>.",{"url":60,"alt":61},"https:\u002F\u002Fimages.prismic.io\u002Fcitizenplane\u002FgNn7YiyVRVFey9D2_main-RMpanelLaurent.png?auto=format,compress","Panel from World Aviation Festival 2026 featuring Laurent Lebard, Head of Revenue Management at CitizenPlane.",{"url":63,"alt":64},"https:\u002F\u002Fimages.prismic.io\u002Fcitizenplane\u002F7l7HYJduOOHtkNey_thumbnail-RMpanelLaurent.png?auto=format,compress","picture of the panel from World Aviation Festival 2026 featuring Laurent Lebard head of Revenue Management at CitizenPlane.",1792749413034]