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The travel big data company is working with BCG, ARC, JetBlue Tech Ventures, and others to help the industry better track demand starting with the Travel Recovery Insights Portal.
Travel analytics platform 3Victors has been tapped to help chart the state of airline demand during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic that has completed devastated all previous planning for air travel demand.
The three-year-old Dallas-based company, which has recently closed a financing from JetBlue Technology Ventures and omnichannel transactions platform ARC, is powering Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Travel Recovery Insights Portal (TRIP), 3Victors CEO Rick Seaney tells Kambr Media.
The issue of turning real-time data into actionable information has been a perennial problem for all industries for over a decade. In creating TRIP, 3Victors and BCG appeared to be particularly cognizant of that issue when they designed it. TRIP’s dashboard breaks down the data in clearly accessible and digestible visuals. TRIP presents a wide-ranging set of analytical tools that will highlight changes across roughly two dozen indicators.
Year-Over-Year Comparison Is Dead
Some of the categories are broad (e.g., the stages of COVID-19 progression by country, economic and consumer sentiment, government restrictions) while others are specific to aviation (e.g., air travel search activity, airline transactions, airline web traffic).
“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,” notes JBTV Venture Associate Jim Lockheed in a Medium post announcing the portal.
The foundation of TRIP’s insights is 3Victors’ ability (pre-COVID-19, of course) to ingest and sift through over 1 billion global searches related to travel demand. That search data was further buttressed by 3Victors’ access to roughly 230 billion travel itineraries in real-time, pre-COVID-19.
3Victors also uses sophisticated algorithms to scrub robotic activity to ferret out true user shopping intent a leading indicator for recovery as the crisis ebbs and travel starts returning.
It all goes to a full, up-to-date view of consumers’ willingness-to-travel, which JBTV’s Lockheed notes “is one of the most important leading indicator signals during this crisis.”
3Victors’ Alternative
3Victors’ is based on the idea of “Data as a Service.” The concept is akin to the more familiar Software as a Service model, where systems run through cloud-based applications via any digitally-connected device, as opposed a dedicated piece of hardware that must be run on the user’s premises.
With a DaaS model like 3Victors, any web-based device can manage and access the data. The benefit of using this type of format by airlines, which typically rely on legacy technology programs, means carriers and their partners have the ability to run 3Victors’ data management products either separately or in concert with existing programs.
And DaaS is what has paved the way for 3Victors to offer “alternative data,” which combines various third-party data sources and filters it through machine learning and AI to find the most reliable real-time insights.
As noted above, given that there are no comparisons for past performance, current data models are pretty much irrelevant for airline revenue managers to plan pricing and offers. That’s why the commercial airline industry need to factor in this kind of information tool.
“Data as a marketplace has been around for a long time,” says Seaney. “In the past, that was only for the well-heeled. Alternative data is a marketplace where companies that generate data, or have access to data, repackage it and sell it on the open market.
“The biggest area of that the last few years have been companies that do roll-ups of anonymized GPS/location data and credit card data,” Seaney adds. “Foursquare is providing data about foot traffic pointing to recovery during COVID-19. OpenTable has a dataset they’re giving away for free that shows cancellations and bookings during the pandemic. We’re moving slowly but surely into the data economy. It’s called ‘alternative data’ now. But in a couple of years, it’ll just be called ‘data.’”
