FleyeSkyHigh

Qatar has been performing some upgrades and changes to the inventory and revenue management systems over the past several weeks. I was told the work was completed earlier in the week (according to my friend who works for Amadeus Group). During the several week period is was very apparent to me that something was going on as full inventories of discount (and award) booking classes were opening up for very short intervals and at completely random times during the day. The other thing that was incredibly interesting is that during that time period you could query ExpertFlyer (or GDS) and the Flight Availability was showing ALL available classes included U and X inventories (those are normally restricted booking classes and are not publicly displayed by GDS or EF). Now that the work is complete those available classes are once again hidden from public query.

The other interesting thing I have noticed is that QR used to release a fixed amount of U business class inventory at the time the schedule opens up and then once those seats were snagged there would rarely be any more released (but on the flip side if someone cancelled and returned the U inventory it often times would return even close to flight date - especially if R was still being sold). This was a bit unique (and rather simple) to QR in that they almost sectioned off a handful of business award seats where as most modern revenue management systems are based on demand and previous year sales statistics for similar dates. Now it seems their process to release award seats may have gotten more highly algorithm based and it would definitely appear the nearly uniform release of a couple or more business award seats at schedule opening may be a thing of the past. For what it's worth, Air Tahiti Nui, which is also another Amadeus customer just a few months ago did a similar change. I image Amadeus may be marketing enhance revenue management software upgrades to their customers.

In any event, since Qatar has a difficult time selling business class on a number of their routes it actually may help shake up Award availability on less popular routes but I think it's going to be harder to rely on those 2-4 business award seats that used to show up a year out on practically all flights. It was a good opportunity to snag difficult to find seats over the past few weeks.