What precisely is revenue integrity? Revenue Integrity is ensuring that passengers travel within the conditions applied to their ticket. This is achieved by eliminating reservations that either create unnecessary additional costs or reduce the saleable space available to other passengers.

A simpler definition is ensuring that the correct passengers travel on the correct flight at the correct fare.

Revenue Leakage – the gap between the revenue that airlines book and the amount that they eventually receive is a significant problem.

The Genesis of Revenue Leakage

Revenue integrity problems stem from four main areas:

• Travel Agents – This is the most frequent cause of revenue leakage. Travel agents use numerous techniques to fool or manipulate the GDS systems for airline bookings.

• Customers – Try to circumvent airline rules

• Airline Staff — Insufficient training – Staff at airlines and travel agents are often accountable for accidental revenue loss through a lack of training.

• Airlines – Unintentionally, airlines will alter scheduled departure and arrival times for flights, which in turn result in passengers not being able to make connections and ultimately ‘no shows’.

How Revenue Leakage Happens

• Abuse of fare rules – creative agents use a variety of methods to fool the system. For example, back dating tickets to secure a more favorable airfare.

• Bookings below Minimum Connection Time (MCT) – Agents issuing tickets that ignore this rule often result in ‘no shows’.

• Cross border selling abuse – carriers will offer passengers the option of flying to a destination via an alternative point. Fares for these are discounted as it allows the airlines to fill empty seats (usually outside their home territory). A problem is however created when a passenger only flies one proportion of this route. This breaks the original terms of the contract and results in unnecessary ‘no shows’ and additional costs, including unwanted meals.

• Incorrect booking classes – Agents will often book a seat in the wrong class to secure a seat on a full flight. As a result the airline will lose the difference between what is charged and what should have been charged.

• Illegal class mix – An illegal mixture of bookings to secure space on flights. Airlines lose the difference of what has been charged and the actual correct fare.

• Duplicate bookings – potential passengers often shop around for fares make the same booking at several different locations.
  
  
  • Multiple bookings on several flights – passengers may create multiple bookings on several flights to secure seats. This is often the case, particularly when a passenger is unsure of which flight they want to secure until the last minute.

• Multiple bookings on multiple carriers – A variation of the problem illustrated above. Here a passenger will create multiple bookings on several flights spread on several different carriers. This will again result in a ‘no show’.
  
  
• Multiple bookings on the same flight – airline staff have often created bookings to fill up flights and block space. Their intention is to avoid passenger offloads and the associated problems that go with this.

• No names in a group or individual booking – bookings are sometimes created without a passenger name. left un-checked, this will result in cancellations or a ‘no show’.

• Name changes – Agents will make speculative bookings by entering false names to secure tickets and favorable fares.

• Passives – These occur when bookings are issued without a ticket. If a ticket is then requested, the passenger can ask a travel agent to issue one, resulting in a passive booking. GDS´ will then charge the airlines for this passive booking.

• Space blocking – Agents booking up space based upon speculative future bookings that may or may not materialize.

• Un-ticketed bookings – bookings that do not have legitimate details entered into the system before a set deadline. More often than not, this results in a ‘no show’.

Revenue Integrity to Curb the Problems of Revenue Leakage

• Identifying commonly used fictitious names
• Spotting consecutive single character first initials (eg Smith A/B/C or Frogs D/E/A/D)
• Picking up ‘fuzzy’ name matches, such as alternative spellings, first name abbreviations and ‘sound alike’ names
• Detecting duplicates between single name PNRs and PNRs with multiple names
• Using other duplicate features in the PNR, such as telephone and frequent flyer numbers to strengthen the match
• Determining non-chronological, overlapping and mirrored itineraries
• Reading connections and understand similar airports, so that it can identify even the most obscure duplicates (e.g. LHR-ORD-LAS and LGW-DFW-LAS)
• Identifying duplicate PNR segments between host airline and other airline space
• Identifying duplicate segments across different PNRs