The travel industry generates a massive amount of search and transaction data, but most travel organizations lack the capabilities to analyze and use this information to their advantage. Without access to insights derived from this data, these companies are at a sustained disadvantage — and this is doubly true in times of crisis, where those with accurate and actionable insights can outperform others.
JetBlue Technology Ventures portfolio company 3Victors solves for this by providing data science as a service to global travel providers. The startup leverages decades of experience in both data science and travel to offer data access, accurate analysis, and real-time responsiveness. To that end, 3Victors has provided a unique search demand dataset and the big data plumbing to help launch a free and publicly accessible Travel Recovery Insights Portal in partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC).
The portal compiles data from a variety of sources to provide travel organizations with access to indicators and trends shaping how demand for travel is returning. It’s one of the most comprehensive reviews into the impact of — and nascent recovery from — COVID-19 on global travel. The portal sections data specific to Search and Ticketing, Economic Sentiment, Consumer Sentiment, Travel Month Comparisons, Airline Capacity, Country-to-Country Impact, Web Traffic, and more.
The 3Victors database inside this portal powers interactive visual dashboards that allow viewers to gain insights in real-time, such as how COVID-19 has impacted inbound/outbound domestic and international tickets and which country pairs have the largest changes in search and ticketing travel metrics. Search demand data is one of the most important leading indicator signals during this crisis — and current data shows that we might have reached our bottom plateau in this data and are now awaiting the uptick. Some countries are beginning to show a very slow and gradual increase in search demand that correlates with early deaths and curve flattening efforts. We encourage you to dig in yourself to see the many insights available.
How It Works
Accurate data enables better decision-making for all kinds of travel operations and segments. From airlines to hotels to rental car companies, optimizing supply to demand requires clear and precise forecasts. However, given COVID-19 is such an unprecedented situation, it’s just not possible to forecast as accurately using standard methods. As described by 3Victors CEO Rick Seaney:
A crisis without historical precedent requires real-time search demand data and analysis to identify and monitor recovery trends. Historical data — which travel organizations have tended to rely on — offers little predictive help and is quickly irrelevant.
Given the broad array of search tools and booking sites, as well as the fragmented travel purchasing process, real-time data collection and analysis is easier said than done. While some approaches rely on robotic web scraping and/or code snippets within booking websites, 3Victors takes a more holistic approach. It uses actual anonymized search and pricing data sourced from global distribution systems, ticketing and booking processors, flight schedule aggregators, and other travel data companies. 3Victors then analyzes these travel searches — over one billion travel searches and priced itineraries per day, pre-COVID-19 — to plot demand patterns worldwide.
The result is a massive data repository that allows for the storage of structured and unstructured data at any scale. This repository is then organized in a cloud-based architecture to normalize the data so that it can be queried from a single location in a consistent, reliable, and real-time fashion. By aggregating search and pricing data from such a wide range of sources, 3Victors’ goal is to accurately predict the search to book ratio on any given airline route/departure date, as well as track pricing trends and surface any notable anomalies.
What sets us apart is that the user generates the inquiry. Our data comes from actual consumers — it’s what they’re seeing inside the browsers. This gives us over one billion searches and itineraries in real-time each day, which we then normalize by deleting duplicates and removing bot traffic to get true user signals.
This type of “true signal” provides an extremely accurate leading indicator of where and when the demand for travel is bouncing back, which 3Victors has layered into the portal. These unique insights can inform all kinds of operational decisions for industry providers, such as planning routes and managing revenue for airlines, choosing which locations to re-open for hotels, optimizing marketing spend for destinations, and analyzing economic activity for governments.
Building An Adaptable Analytics Infrastructure
Bloomberg Businessweek recently opined that America needs real-time economic data to get through this COVID-19 crisis. Businesses are moving away from monthly/weekly/batch insights that don’t always reflect recent reality to dynamic and real-time analytics that are far more accurate and representative of what’s happening now.
In a modern world that’s fluid and always changing, the most competitive businesses will make critical operational decisions based on real-time data to remain resilient and adaptable. Data is being generated at faster rates and volumes than ever before and enterprise analytics infrastructure must keep up to ensure that this data is used as effectively as possible. Otherwise, as Bloomberg emphasizes, the data will fail us and we’ll be “flying blind.”
Browse the Travel Recovery Insights Portal for more learnings and insights and visit 3Victors to learn more about their services.
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