Malaysia Airlines Lifts Yield 15% Moving to PROS Cloud

“For Malaysia Airlines to establish itself as a world-class carrier, we must continue embracing change and taking bold steps to further our digital transformation,” says Izham Ismail, Group CEO for Malaysia Airlines.

Malaysia’s flag carrier is on a quest to become a digital leader in the airline industry. As a longtime customer of PROS Revenue Management, which contributed to record-breaking RASK in 2019, the airline has since upgraded to PROS cloud-based RM Advantage solution, obtaining greater operational efficiencies and revolutionizing its revenue performance capabilities.

Leading the Way

Through the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption of the air travel industry, Malaysia Airlines has prioritized digital transformation as a cornerstone of its continued success. In early 2020, the national airline was among the first to migrate to PROS most advanced cloud-based revenue management solution.

“Technology is vital to success, and we have confidence in PROS to help us achieve continued performance improvements,” Izham says. “By further modernizing our revenue management system with digital tools and innovations, we are more agile in adapting to market shifts and customer needs.” 

Into the Cloud

For several years, Malaysia Airlines has relied on PROS world-class revenue management solution to ascertain the fare mix that maximizes revenue lift on every departure. The airline’s team of demand, flight, and pricing analysts depend on the revenue management system to deliver the best offers in a highly complex and unpredictable marketplace.

“We have had tremendous success since we upgraded to PROS new system, leveraged the expertise of PROS consultants, and massively restructured our revenue management team,” says Dersenish Aresandiran, Global Head of Revenue Management for Malaysia Airlines. “The move to the cloud was important for us to continue advancing our revenue management approach with the power of big data and artificial intelligence.”

“We want to take advantage of every bit of insight, speed, and efficiency to maximize our business performance,” Dersenish adds. “Especially in today’s market, data-centric revenue management strategies are crucial.” This is especially important in a market where customer expectations are shifting while the airline industry looks to revitalize demand as COVID-19 restrictions are eased and traveler sentiment improves.

The PROS Cloud-based revenue management solution delivers:

Groundbreaking, algorithmic forecasting, and network optimization. By considering a vast number of processes with the power of artificial intelligence, the PROS revenue management solution provides deeper visibility into data and market movements. The PROS Cloud-based solution delivers cutting-edge forecasting methodologies as well as streamlined access to the latest features and functionalities. Furthermore, PROS revenue management experts can provide technical support and recommendations faster than ever before.

Modern, intuitive workflows. Information is fed into workflows specifically designed around the way airline analysts work. The workflows guide analysts through the analysis of their markets, from alerts with multiple analysis screens through to action screens. Integrated analysis and action workflows on the same screens facilitate ease of use. The PROS system’s workflows are focused on an exception-based management approach that automatically forecasts and optimizes, so analysts can confidently make changes and quickly adjust forecasts with much greater insight and less manual work.

Cloud-based scalability and security. PROS revenue management solutions are built on a state-of-the-art network security infrastructure. The solution is hosted on Microsoft Azure with industry-leading security, performance, compliance, and uptime and availability SLAs. With PROS revenue management, Malaysia Airlines can focus on providing its business counterparts with transformational digital selling capabilities without having to worry about the day-to-day operations of an additional technology product.

Sky-High Performance Gains

Since migrating to PROS new SaaS-based revenue management solution, Malaysia Airlines has seen multiple improvements to business performance and efficiency. “We have realized a significant yield increase, which is up by 15%, a mix of capacity impact with better inventory management, and balancing supply and demand to the bottom line,” Dersenish says.

The cloud version of PROS revenue management solution reduces manual influences in the system, so analysts have less manual work to do and can instead focus on other strategic initiatives. In fact, the team has realized a 30% improvement in process efficiencies. Tasks that used to require as many as four hours are now completed in less than one hour. “We’re allocating 25% fewer resources while getting the job done faster, an invaluable benefit given that revenue management decision-making speed is crucial in advancing Malaysia Airlines’ commercial strategies,” Dersenish says.

As a strategic partner, PROS has worked closely with Malaysia Airlines to take advantage of the revenue management tool’s capabilities to the fullest.

“The support from PROS consultants has also been fantastic,” Dersenish says. “By helping us calibrate our forecasting accuracy and fine-tune our revenue management best practices, we have stepped up our dynamic fare management.

“Our partnership has never been better. We have 101% confidence in PROS.”

Next Stop: Willingness-to-Pay Forecasting and Optimization  

In addition to all the advantages that come with a cloud-based revenue management environment, such as lower total cost of ownership, the solution enables smooth upgrades to new functionalities such as Willingness-to-Pay forecasting and optimization. Malaysia Airlines plans to adopt this unique feature of PROS mid-2021.

This is an approach that relies on data science to calculate the likelihood that a passenger would make a purchase at any given price. The information is then used to automatically adjust the available fare to account for potential buy-down behavior.

“We felt this ground-breaking science was a must-have for us, especially in light of our goal to lead the air travel industry in revenue management dynamics,” Dersenish says. “We look forward to leveraging the latest advancements in tools, digitalization and PROS expertise; Malaysia Airlines eagerly adopts new developments from PROS to position ourselves as the industry leader.”

“PROS has helped us achieve substantial value from their innovative, digital technologies as well as their deep knowledge of the airline industry,” Izham says. “We look forward to continuing this work to drive additional efficiencies to help us achieve our business goals.”