Airlines need to make as much profit out of operations as ever. "Revenue Integrity" minimises the difference between "expected" and actual revenue. Traditional reservation systems enable their customers to reserve several seats, if they like, until a final decision is made. In the meantime, seats remain blocked and cannot be booked by other customers. What’s worse, airlines still have to pay GDS fees whether or not they receive payment in the form of an issued ticket.

Overall, this results in potentially high revenue loss as seats either remain blocked, or are released too late for sale.

The test of any revenue integrity solution is the degree of value it can generate for the bottom line of an airline. Mercator has teamed with Sabre RI, a best-in-breed provider. The Sabre integrity solution finds problems and resolves them much faster than any other solution in the marketplace. Airlines have found gains in having more seats available for sale, less seats returned, reduced denied boardings, better forecasting, etc.

The benefits of the solution include:

	Real-time processing - bookings are processed within seconds after creation or changes, finding and solving problems as fast as possible
	Flexible and responsive - easy to use interface lets airlines set up new processes and change the configuration of existing ones
	Straightforward - the solution is delivered as an ASP service, leaving the airline to focus on business problems only
	Exceptional value - the solution will deliver outstanding value from the first month

Leading airlines are discovering that applying revenue integrity principles to curtail revenue leakage can yield better profit improvements and cost reductions than any other changes to their business.

	Immediate recognition and challenge of "illegal" bookings
	Travel Agent / Passenger is updated real-time
	Fewer No-shows and higher load factors
	Prevents non-revenue blockage of inventory
	Improved forecasting of actual booking realisation to flown
	Less resources required to analyse bookings and tickets

Key System Features

Booking Integrity
Post Flight Sales (PFS)
After flight departure the PNRs are updated with post departure information like no show passengers, no record passengers, up- and downgraded passengers, added frequent flyer numbers, off-loaded passengers etc. This enables systems to perform revenue management for future flights. This will also have a positive effect on the optimisation of flights.

Handling of No Shows
If a passenger is No Show on a particular flight, onward segments are cancelled. Where passenger may not travel, inventory is released to create new supply.

Waitlist Handling
Waitlisted segments are assigned different level of priority codes based on configurable rules like frequent flyer members are given higher priority than the normal passengers. Depending on the level of priority, seat is released to the waitlisted passenger when it becomes available. This results in optimization of flights and revenue generation.

In a specified time before flight departure, waitlisted bookings which have no chances of being confirmed are cancelled to save on GDS cost.

Duplicate Bookings
Checks for Dupes and assigns time-limit. Once the time limit expires, the dupe PNR is either cancelled or placed for manual action. This results in increased sales of seats, less over catering and decrease in No Shows.

Blacklist & Point of Sale control
Exclusive allowance or restriction applied to Sell/availability transactions originating from specific city or travel agent.
Ability to control sale of seats per booking class based on Point of sale so that Revenue management can allocate seats to various point of sales based on the revenue plan. Point of sale can be a city (ATO/CTO/GDS), territory, country, region, IATA agent, non-IATA agent or other airline.

Reservations-DCS synchronisation
Synchronization of Class change from MARS to MACS after check-in, real time inventory update during up/downgrade, change in logic to close flight for booking based on MACS checked-in figure, cancellation of waitlisted segment in case ET passenger travelled on earlier flight and transfer of waitlisted passenger in MACS are amongst the supported functionalities.

Ticketing Integrity
Ticket Deadline Control (TDC)
TDC is an automated process to control ticketing deadlines of GDS bookings. It allows local sales offices and central functions to establish whether a booked passenger has a real intention to travel and to enforce adherence to ticketing deadlines for bookings in specific classes. PNRs are either queue placed or auto-cancel if the ticket is not issued within the predefined deadline. This results in large savings for the airline.

Ticket Firming
Time limit to issue a ticket is assigned to all PNRs without ticket numbers. Message is sent to the GDS for all unticketed GDS bookings. On the expiry of time limit, the PNRs which remain unticketed are either queue placed for manual intervention or auto cancelled depending on the Airline's preferred course of action. The main objective of Ticket Firming is to reduce the Global Distribution System cost and reduce the No Show level.

Electronic ticket handling & validation
An electronic ticket cannot be attached to a PNR if passenger name in PNR and ET does not match. At reissuance, system checks if ET specified in Form of Payment is valid, i.e. if it exists. System can also restrict ticket reissuance if class of travel is different from the booked class.

During check-in, Not Valid Before/Not Valid After dates, ticket number, coupon status, passenger name, city pair and flight dates are all validated from MARS to ensure that passenger has a valid ticket record.

To avoid misuse, change of coupon status from Final status (Flown, Refund or Exchanged) to OPEN is prohibited. Furthermore, if passenger uses coupons which are out of sequence and is No Show, previous coupon is changed to "suspended".