When it comes to the profitability of any travel agency, the efficient monitoring of what money is coming in and what is going out, is a vital part of the business. But the complex terms of the incentive agreements and the inability to track flown revenue makes it almost impossible.

Indeed, revenue management is a vital part of optimising revenue for travel agencies for both online travel agencies (OTAs) and travel management companies (TMCs). Commission based sales targets (or “back-end incentives”) are becoming more and more complex as airlines incentivising different types of products. 

Different push actions with specific RBDs (the reservation booking designator or booking class) or market share and annual targets with layovers are making contracts much more dynamic and flexible, but travel agencies have to deal with contract papers with no way to track target reach or measure commission. 

“The technological dis-advantages of travel agencies around the world are making them lose a lot of money” says the CEO of Avian, Mickey Haslavsky, and he continues “There are no real ways to measure data properly in the industry and when you mix this problem with the fact that nobody has the ability to track flown revenue and hundreds of different conditions including taxes and different payment scenarios multiply by millions of dollars in sales — it’s a real disaster”

The end of tedious work with spreadsheets?

Avian was built to change the status quo and to provide travel agencies with the ability to manage revenue from incentives in a more clear and straightforward way.

The online software allows travel agencies to automatically scan airline incentive agreements with no manual filing and by connecting to BSP (IATA’s Billing Settlement Plan) or ARC (Airlines Reporting Corporation) and the GDSs (Global Distribution System) – get a clear real-time overview of their revenue from commissions and incentives. The technology also has the ability to track flown revenue and to manage different incentive scenarios, in order to provide the travel agency management with flexibility of revenue management from incentives.

A better way

In this article, Avian reveals how using their technology can easily convert an incentive agreement into an online calculator allowing the agency to track commissions in real-time.

Another important part of the software is the ability to divide the contracts into plans, which stands for a calculator. Every contract has different incentive plans in it: push actions, layovers, safety, and annual plan and using the technology allowing agencies to manage different streams of revenue from each contract.

This has been one of the biggest problems for travel agencies around the world in the past 10 years… Having so many revenues being managed blindly with no ability to optimize, creates hard times for travel agencies to increase profit margins and optimize revenue streams – and we are here to fix that” says Mickey Haslavsky.