Global aviation fare registration platform ATPCO will use the recent award of a technology patent to redevelop its pricing calculation system.
Until now, airline ticket prices have been created using individual elements provided by a carrier, such as fares, schedules, taxes and regulatory requirements from governments.
These are combined with airlines "rules," including promotions and flight dates (many carriers use the "Saturday night stay" condition, for example).
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This process was typically performed on a caching basis.
The new patent will allow ATPCO to build a a new version platform that will calculate and generate all published prices around the world in real time.
Such a development will give carriers and airline partners "a total view of all prices that make up a market," ATPCO claims, with existing platforms focusing mostly on lowest fares in the marketplace.
Existing cached pricing results can become outdated quickly, causing problems for carriers that are monitoring fares and market trends, ATPCO's chief architect Navid Abbassi says.
He adds: "Detecting when elements change, testing how scenarios will price and validating fares before they are distributed are enabled by this technology."