Longtail's innovative platform combines extensive amounts of data with its intelligence, creating an industry-first autonomous pricing platform that expands an airline's network footprint. It's also fully dynamic and keeps up-to-date with the billions of price changes and thousands of schedule changes made every day.
Behind every great product is great data, and today we speak to the CEO, Adam Aly, at Longtail to discover how they are helping airlines grow their revenue and increase their search visibility - without adding a single physical flight -using OAG's Flight Info Direct.
Flight Info Direct is a highly configurable aviation data platform - powered by Snowflake, it provides customers with instant access to OAG’s data. With Flight Info Direct, customers plug directly into OAG’s data warehouse, then access, query, and analyze flight data sets, automatically integrating feeds into existing systems and APIs.
Q: Can you tell us how your solution works?
A: In short, the Longtail platform ingests huge amounts of data, such as OAG schedules, price and consumer demand data to evaluate every possible route that an airline could serve in connection with its partner carriers. The platform prioritizes those which have sufficient demand, assesses the competitive landscape of alternative routes, and then creates a complete pricing structure that is market ready.
From then on, Longtail monitors all market changes (prices and schedules) to ensure that the airline’s routings are always priced competitively, and consumers have more choice at the right price when booking.
Q: What do your customers love most about Longtail? In other words, was your solution something that was needed and missing in the market before Longtail came along?
A: Our customers love Longtail’s ability to service thousands of routings that would otherwise take an army of pricing analysts to manage. Better still, the platform is autonomous, so it requires almost no human involvement and does not divert scarce resources from the airline’s own IT teams.
On average, our customers see a 150% increase in sales thanks to the 14% increase in revenue-generating O&D pairs. Having the tools needed to expand their offering and create a new revenue stream without human involvement makes Longtail a great choice for our customers.
Q: What do you want people who haven’t heard about Longtail to know about your product and services?
A: The key thing we’d like people to know about Longtail is that it’s quick and simple to implement and costs nothing until it starts to generate incremental revenue for the airline using it. This is something we’re proud of because it gives our customers the reassurance that, in a space that is becoming more and more occupied by different AI options, Longtail is here to work for them. We’re so confident in our product, that we shoulder that revenue risk alongside our customers.
Q: Can you describe a few of the reasons you decided to partner with OAG? For example, anything about OAG’s data and platform capabilities that were most appealing to your team?
A: Our team’s background is in airlines, where we used schedules data from OAG on a daily basis, so we’d all come across OAG before and had all-around positive experiences with the teams there. In our industry, OAG is widely known as the gold standard when it comes to data quality and breadth. So, when we needed a source of schedules, we chose OAG without question, as we already knew we could trust and rely on the data with complete confidence.
Q: Can you tell us how Longtail is specifically using Flight Info Direct?
A: We use Flight Info Direct to build out route networks for airlines. Our platform directly connects to OAG’s data warehouse, and we pull the data automatically into our own system. We like Flight Info Direct because it minimizes ETL and the data is ready to go right within where we already work- it must have saved us a few hours a week at least.
We combine the structured data pulled from OAG with other data, such as pricing and consumer demand data, to build a 360 view of all the routes an airline could participate in. Our unique ranking algorithms then compare our created routes against competitor offerings and create crafted route itineraries for all seasons, classes and products.
Specifically, we build non-stop, 1-stop, and 2-stop itineraries for the forward 365 days in an airline’s extended network with its partners.
Q: What is it about OAG’s data and platform you think will help Longtail stand out among competitors in the market?
A: OAG’s innovative platform and accurate data enables us to seamlessly blend data from multiple sources and deliver game-changing products to our customers at speed, and the quality and reliability of the data enables us to stand out amongst competitors. Additionally, the freshness of the data speeds up our GTM initiatives and this helps us stand out in the market.
Q: Can you share any specific results gained by working with OAG and using Flight Info Direct so far?
A: For a typical international carrier, we generate > 100M itineraries (up to two stops) for the next 365 days on 25,000+ origin & city combinations using the airline and its partner flights and using Minimum Connection Time data (MCT).
At OAG, our flight data and delivery solutions are always evolving, so, as we move into new territory with Flight Info Direct, keep an eye out for upcoming changes and additions.
If you're interested in Flight Info Direct, or wish to find out more about it and how it could help your business, get in touch with one of our specialists today.
Find out more about Longtail here
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