Airline Master Data

Airline companies need a data-driven, action-oriented, and digitally supported approach to emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis.

Most companies in the airlines industry were caught on ongoing digital transformation processes, adopting innovative business models, transforming core and non-core functions, providing more personalized and relevant information, products, and services. To increase their customer loyalty and satisfaction, their conversion rates, and supporting sustainable profits.

The urgency of all these processes is now even more pressing and, as customers resume travel, airlines need to focus on the end-to-end experience to accommodate customer expectations.

Proving a seamless experience, means working closer to other partners in the travel ecosystem – hotels, travel agencies, tour operators, etc. – to create strong customer relationships.

This effort is dependent on investments on data warehouses, data lakes, analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to provide a full view of the customer, yet most of these investments will fall short without a strong customer data foundation.

Looking at this scenario, at all these bright, shining projects, with cutting edge technology, writing about Master Data Management might be plain boring. Maybe that’s why MDM it’s not usually under the spotlight – although a powerful tool to leverage all those other projects.

This somehow hides the real importance and the various benefits that MDM can bring to an airline.

In an industry usually characterized by:

• Reduced cooperation across lines of business

• Data siloed within lines of business

• No systematic approach to data quality

• Weak KYC and due diligence standards

• Very limited information on customers

Master data is the critical driver that enables organization to exploit the vast amounts of data they gather in an efficient way.

Master data is the heart of the most valuable information that an organization owns, helping every line of business to deliver value.

What is Master Data?

Master data is usually defined as the set of core entities within an organization, depending on the industry it may include customers, prospects, suppliers, sites, hierarchies etc.

The purpose of managing this data is to assure a consistent definition of these business entities and data about them across the organization’s multiple systems, establishing a standard definition for business-critical data that represents a single source of truth.

What about Airline Master Data?

When looking at an airline, besides the examples mentioned above as customers, suppliers, etc, a few examples of more industry specific master data entities are: Aircraft, Airports, Employees, Products and services, Travel Agencies or reference data.

Master data management should cover the process of collecting the data for each of these domains and provide it to all relevant systems and stakeholders.

What are the benefits?

Master data management provides various benefits to the efficiency and success of an airline, either directly or as a support component for many of the digital transformation initiatives, enabling the capability to:

• Reduce costs by moving from a GDS assisted booking to airline hosted booking

• Base decisions on a consolidated and consistent enterprise level view of customer information

• Achieve a clearer knowledge of the full customer base.

• Enable seamless and consistent cross channel customer experiences

• To manage the preference and consent information in a centralized manner

• Improve targeting and personalization to get additional business in a more cost-effective way.

It’s important to keep in mind that this value can only be delivered once the master data is consumed by everyone in the organization, meaning that there are costs associated with the integration with other systems (Core, CRM, BPM, Portals, etc.) that have to be considered to achieve these benefits.

Conclusions

A master data management initiative can’t be a stand-alone initiative. It is a disruptive process and its success relies heavily on a strong executive sponsorship and on data governance policies and processes and it’s critical to assure a focused approach, choosing a business case that can bring visibility to the initiative within a reasonable time-frame and budget, to get the stakeholders buy-in and organizational awareness.