Forecasting Is A Critical Function Of Revenue Management And Planning For Businesses

The United States carries over one third of the globe’s total traffic, where Over 1.5 billion passengers fly annually. Over the past 20 years, air travel has grown at an average of about 5% per year, the reason for annual change is usually differences in economic growth, and of course other environmental factors, such as the current war. As a rule, the annual growth in air travel has been about twice the annual growth in GDP. Deregulation, liberalization, and competition have essentially altered the management strategies and practices of airlines. Productivity improvements and cost management have been two of the greatest concerns for US airlines for the past twenty years. As a whole, the airline industry must continue to improve their specialization in terms of fleet utilization, pricing and revenue management, and schedule optimization.

The airline industry has long attempted to segment the air travel market in order to effectively target its constituents. The classic airline model consists of First Class, Business Class and Economy, and the demographics that make up the classes have both similarities and differences to the other classes. For instance there may be similarities between business class travellers on a particular flight, but they will not all be travelling for the same reason. An almost-universal characteristic of air travel is that customers do not fly for the sake of flying; the destination is the important element and the travel is a by-product, a means-to-an-end that involves the necessity of an aircraft that gets the customer from point A to point B.

The airline industry is an extremely competitive industry and is also a highly seasonal industry. Profit can be drastically affected by fluctuations in energy prices or economic downturns (Maverick, 2015). Key financial metrics utilized by analysts in the airline industry include the quick ratio, the return on assets ratio and the debt capitalization ratio, which was already covered earlier (Maverick, 2015).

He challenged all stakeholders in the air transport value chain to keep pace with an aggressive agenda for industry change. After at least two years of lost growth, traffic is back to pre-September levels in most parts of the world. First quarter 2004 passenger traffic was 6.5% above the same period for 2001 while cargo volumes were 15.5% above 2001 levels. Firms in the commercial airline industry were studied to ascertain their use of strategic market planning. The results indicate strategic market planning and related techniques (Experience curve/cost analysis, portfolio analysis, investment opportunity analysis, and PIMS)

Continental Airlines has been experiencing turbulent times in recent quarters and without material changes to the company’s operations it may have worse times ahead. Using the results from my regression analysis, as well as cost estimation, I have forecasted what Continental can expect for revenue, costs, and profit in 2009. Table 2 is shown below, which shows the financial summary of Continental Airlines, based on reduced flight capacity and the projections I have been provided with.

Forecasting is the methodology utilized in the translation of past experiences in an estimation of the future. The German market presents challenges for forecasting techniques especially for its retail segment. Commercially oriented organizations are used to help during forecasting as general works done by academic scientists are not easy to come across (Bonner, 2009).

Piedmont Airlines recently invested over $1 million in state of the art equipment and employee development in order to forecast and analyze the appropriate amount of discounted fares to offer per flight. The company discovered that by offering several discounted flights to consumers willing to book their travel well in advance of their departure date left many options available for the business traveler who needed to book much closer to the actual departure date. The analysis was the task of the Revenue Enhancement Department (RED) managed by Marilyn Hoppe. While this state of the art equipment was a step in the right direction, Marilyn believed that there were still a lot of subjective decisions being made and

Airlines must operate within a low-margin, high-fixed-cost environment, making profitability particularly sensitive to decreases in volume, either from environmental factors (e.g., the September 11,2001 attacks) or from competition. Moreover, the airline business is labor-intensive. Labor costs as a percentage of revenues ranges from a low of about 25 percent for the low-fare airlines to almost 50

The Airline industry has experienced continual problems with rising costs with both fuel and maintenance which has caused them to increase their fees to the consumers to pay for those rising costs. This paper will help explain what an airline such as Delta does to help alleviate such costs without forcing its consumers to flip the bill through high fees that consist of tickets, baggage fees and food. The costs of doing business in aviation today have spiraled out of control making it very expensive for both airlines and the

Airlines use a formula of combining their yield and inventory costs to determine ticket prices. While it is imperative to focus on the idea of being profitable, the focus is to maximize the cost of the flight revenue. One huge factor that encourages an increase in the cost of tickets relates to a customer ordering a ticket close to the departing date, define this as a risk factor because they need to make up for all unsold seats. A high percentage of the revenue is dedicated to overhead costs such as fuel and labor. When a ticket price is higher with one airline than the other, the customer interprets this as being an excessive cost. The demand is greatly affected by the external market

This paper discusses the external economic factors affecting the strategic decision of airline industry and how this decision in turn, affect the market forecast of the aircraft manufacturing industry. Various business issues affect airlines operation either directly and indirectly, and

Over the past years, customers have been heavily relying on airline reservation systems to book their tickets, reserve seats, pay for the tickets and also check-in online. For customers, this has been a very convenient method and they are able to easily plan their trips. For the Airline companies, these systems have the whole flight inventory managed. They have all the flight information stored and records are maintained. It also provides a platform for communication between other airline companies for their “code-sharing plans” and

American Airlines’ “store front” is the computerized reservations system, SABRE (semi-automated business research environment). All sale and cancellation transactions, whether from American Airlines reservations agents or travel agents, pass through SABRE, updating reservations inventory for all affected flights. Because the yield management decision-making process is so large and complex at American Airlines, effective control of the inventory of seats can be accomplished only with more advanced automated models.

Airline industry is a growing and a challenging industry across the globe and it is becoming more competitive on quality, pricing and most prominently safety in the contemporary world.

Business forecasting is the process of studying historical performance for the purpose of using the information gained to project future business conditions so that decisions can be made today that will assist in the achievement of certain goals. Forecasting involves taking historical date and using it to project future data with a mathematical model. Forecasts are extensively used to support business decisions and direct the work of operations managers. In this paper I will introduce different types of forecasting techniques.