A leading ticketing consolidator based in the United Arab Emirates was using all Global Distribution Systems (GDS) to cater to its diverse client base of travel agencies across the GCC. Total number of GDS tickets was little over 520,000 per annum and total nett sale volume in 2018 was approximately AED 375 million. The refund desk was centralized but the staffs were inundated with cancellation requests on a day to day basis and unable to spare time from client interactions. The customer was also facing high attrition as key staffs were poached by competitors and sometimes even the clients
Problem StatementNo problem stated. The customer was in complete denial of the fact that they need improvement. Customer was aware that approximately 1.5% of all tickets issued were unused and potentially refundable as we had been constantly hammering them with such data points. But for reasons best known to them, the customer steadfastly refused to outsource management of unused tickets claiming that they had the competence and also support from their GDS to manage the data on their own.
Our SolutionProof of concept. We persisted and asked them to do the math and check if they were matching the industry benchmark for recovery. Clearly they were not. We reminded the customer that our unused ticket tracking program was at zero cost to them and that we would work on a success fee model so there is zero risk in validating the data from us. After signing the Non Disclosure Agreement and obtaining the required system access of all GDS used by them, we checked a sample data of two quarters of 2018 from a busy IATA location in Abu Dhabi. The results were stunning. The customer had over 90 fully unused tickets of a single airline which had expired as over a year old and over 200 tickets which should been refunded by the time we checked the data. This exercise was a superb proof of concept. As soon as the report was shared with General Manager of the company, they were in a huddle to investigate why and how they missed the tickets found by us. Reasons were several – a couple of staff were on vacation, Checking was done on the incorrect GDS, Operations staff could not spare time, Tickets were not found in the GDS tool they were using etc. etc.
The missed savings calculated for the expired tickets was AED 38700 I.e. higher than the fee they would have paid us. It was an obvious & immediate decision to outsource all data and we scraped over AED 215,000 in savings from data which was junked by the customer.
We now service the data each month for all IATA locations and the customer is delighted with the savings they accrue and for the higher levels of services they are able to provide to their clients. The MIS we provided was an eye opener for the customer, helped them to see the gaps and facilitated them to improve their own internal processes as well.
BenefitsWe enabled the customer to improve its cash flow by
Zero attrition worries as our teams are working without a break.
Complete confidentiality due to distance from customer’s operations
Zero Conflict of Interest as we have no contact with our customer’s clients
Daily monitoring & supervision of data
Quality Assurance
Guaranteed results
Travel Metrics is a champion in recovering lost money on both Full Service and Low Cost Airlines. Most importantly we work with an entrepreneurial mind set and our recoveries have been as low 10 AED, 8 SAR and 50 INR etc because we truly believe that every paisa counts. Since this service is at a zero cost we ensure the customer is never out of pocket.