Aviation industry is steadily growing on the long term by about 5% every year and was able to double the size of its business over the past 20 years. It is likely the most global market after investment banking, it is subject to more disruptions than any other industries. Pandemics, today with the Covid-19 or previously the H1N1’s in 2009, but also social unrest, political issues, as well aseconomic crisis. Hence, the aviation industry challenge is to prepare for the growth in the long term, while having the flexibility to rapidly adapt in the short and medium terms. Predictive Mobility objective is to help the travel industry to overcome the challenges of disruptions with actionable solutions! Their set of solutions has been specifically designed to address such challenge, by optimizing in real time the airlines’ commercial policies, their pricing, but also the allocation of their assets andthe proactivesearch for new opportunities. 

The two guiding principles behind the creation of Predictive Mobility: how to integrate multiple data sources, and how to make actionable decisions out of this mass of information. “Our technological platform allows us to integrate more than 300 different sources of market information, making it the largest database designed and available for the travel industry,” says Christophe Ritter, Founder of Predictive Mobility. “From historical traffic, to social media, CRM, or travel web Christophe Ritter, Managing Partner, Predictive Mobility SEPTEMBER 2020 5 searches, our technology helps our clients to identify potential market opportunities.”

Helping Client’s make Strategic Decisions

The company’s objective is to help clients in deciding what best course of action they should follow, whether they have a strategic issue or a more tactical problem to solve. “Let’s assume that a new start up airline will fly on three of the many destinations you are operating. You will have to address this competitive threaton each individual marketobviously, but at the same time the profitability of your airline requires that all your resources are best used and generate the maximum profit,” explains Christophe. “If you scale down your operations somewhere, you must find an opportunity that will at least compensate it. Big data allows us to consider multiple streams of information, from customers’ purchasing pattern, web searches, prices, length of stay, loyalty, customer typology, and many other elements to help building a relevant multidimensional strategy.”

The company’s platform is called AIR.PM and providesin the same application all elements required for an airline to work on its marketing planning activities, whether is it to adjust a flight time, reallocate its fleet, review its pricing, and stimulate demand through promotional activities. And Predictive Mobilitykey objective is to help the customers to build a competitive scenario and simulate its impact. “Of course, the quality and diversity of our data sources is a prerequisite. But we are working a lot on clusterization and machine learning,” adds Christophe. “To give you a practical example, each city in the world is qualified by 8 different criteria, some of them related to the wealth of the population, age pyramid, or purchasing pattern. We put them in a similar cluster and run our machine learning algorithms to help predict the potential of a market behavior on historical demand but also advance indicators. So, if an airline wants to fly in a destination in the same cluster, our forecasts are much more specific and accurate than just using historical data. And actually, we have low cost carriers as clients that specifically choose our solution because even without any previous operations, we were able to predict accurately what the demand would be by segment of clientele.”

Growing for the Future

Predictive Mobility is currently in a growth phase, and they want to further develop theirsolution’s dynamic pricing capabilities, incorporating more customer profiling information in order to improve the type of services provided to the airline’s customers, and overall enhancing the travel package value offered to them. Cultural distance between regions is also something the company is planning to focus on, since it does influence the market approach, or completely missing, since airlines tend to provide a standardized service, based on their own market. While what is expected for example in the US as a base service, might not be the same in Asia and Europe. “Beside our solution envelope, we are also looking to expand in Asia, since the travel demand is planning to increase, while at the same time enter a phase of consolidation between the airline companies, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic and its effect on the travel market,” says Christophe. “And this is where we deliver the highest value: being ahead of the pack, to be the driver of this movement, rather being a follower and trying to limit the effects of it.”