Galactic Air Improves Airline Ancillary Revenues with Dynamic Personalized Pricing

35 Pages Posted: 4 May 2021

See all articles by Arinbjorn Kolbeinsson

Arinbjorn Kolbeinsson

Imperial College London

Naman Shukla

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Akhil Gupta

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lavanya Marla

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kartik Yellepeddi

Deepair Solutions

Date Written: April 29, 2021

Abstract

Ancillaries are a rapidly growing source of revenue for airlines, yet their prices are currently statically determined using rules-of-thumb and are matched only to the average customer, or to customer groups. Offering ancillaries at dynamic and personalized prices based on flight characteristics and customer needs could greatly improve airline revenue and customer satisfaction. Through a startup (Deepair) that builds and deploys novel machine learning techniques to introduce such dynamically priced ancillaries to airlines, we partnered with a major European airline, Galactic Air, to build models and algorithms for improved pricing. These algorithms recommend dynamic personalized ancillary prices for a stream of features (called context) relating to each shopping session. Our recommended prices are restricted to be lower than the human-curated prices for each customer group. We designed and compared multiple machine learning models and deployed the best performing ones live on the airline's booking system in an online A/B testing framework. Over a six-month live implementation period, our dynamic pricing system increased ancillary revenue per offer by 25% and conversion rate by 15% compared to the industry standard of human-curated rule-based prices.

Keywords: airline ancillary pricing, dynamic pricing, customized pricing, deep learning

Suggested Citation

Kolbeinsson, Arinbjorn and Shukla, Naman and Gupta, Akhil and Marla, Lavanya and Yellepeddi, Kartik, Galactic Air Improves Airline Ancillary Revenues with Dynamic Personalized Pricing (April 29, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3836941 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3836941

Arinbjorn Kolbeinsson

Imperial College London ( email )

South Kensington Campus
Exhibition Road
London, Greater London SW7 2AZ
United Kingdom

Naman Shukla

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( email )

601 E John St
Champaign, IL Champaign 61820
United States

Akhil Gupta

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( email )

601 E John St
Champaign, IL Champaign 61820
United States

Lavanya Marla (Contact Author)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( email )

601 E John St
Champaign, IL Champaign 61820
United States

Kartik Yellepeddi

Deepair Solutions ( email )

0 References

    0 Citations

      Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

      Paper statistics

      Downloads
      580
      Abstract Views
      1,901
      Rank
      98,288
      PlumX Metrics