A collaboration between Finnair, Amadeus and search giant Google has paved the way for how modern dynamic pricing can integrate with results from more static cached data sets.
Dynamic, or continuous, pricing means fares are constantly changing which means Google’s search is not able to identify discrete fares available for customer searching on Google Flights.
Asif Khan, Google head of strategic partnerships, told the Amadeus Altitude25 conference in Lisbon this week that it meant the “bullseye of the target kept moving from us”.
“We are a cache-based system, that’s what we have optimised for. With continuous pricing prices started changing a lot more frequently than before. We had to come up some different ideas to do it.”
Finnair vice president global sales and channel management Jenni Soumela said: “We did not want to drop off Google display but also did not want to lose the positives of dynamic pricing.”
The answer was Amadeus MetaConnect Search technology that allowed Google to adapt to dynamic fare management provided by a neutral source of content.
“We continue to see much more choice for our customers, a much more diverse range of product,” said Soumela.
“At the same time we need to focus on relevance. How do we take the context of the customer in bringing the offers to them that really matter and how do we communicate the value that our offers bring.”
Asif said: “It’s all about users. We want to make sur we along with the intent of the user. The only way we can do that is to provide actionable results to them.
“We are aligned with the objectives of our airline partners on this. They are trying to optimise revenue and we are trying to optimise user experience. These two things are very symbiotic.”
Asif said Google did not want to see a proliferation of bespoke solution and wanted to see a move towards “some kind of uniformity” in approach to continuous pricing.
And he predicted significant change in search coming to travel with a move Google is already seeing towards the vast majority being “initiated by images” expected to impact the industry. “Having unfettered access to data is going to be key for the future.”
The post Altitude25: How Google and Finnair solved the challenge of dynamic pricing in search appeared first on Aviation Business News.