Competition Tracking: from strategic asset to vital resource?

Corentin Vidal

8 June 2020

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Competition tracking is the complex process that aims at providing a solution to a simple need: knowing and understanding the prices that your competitors offer to the same customers you are targeting. Such data has significant added value, to help you estimate your market share, adjust your fare structure, adapt your terms & conditions, build new Revenue Management strategies, or define your network and schedule.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had many consequences on the transport industry. For all the teams involved in market analysis, pricing, and planning, one of them was that a lot of decision support tools were no longer relevant: reference data was obsolete, forecasting models were jeopardized… With little to no visibility as to the traveling restrictions in the months to come, both for domestic and international, the conundrum of post-Covid-19 will likely last well after 2020.

Before even starting to find answers, analysts will have to ensure they ask the right questions.

New paradigms will have to be found to ensure preventive measures such as social distancing can be enforced in a world where revenue and operating costs remain a key focus. Will the sharp decrease of oil price allow to maintain competitive pricing and compensate for the fact that only half of the seats might be open for sale? What would be the impact of a significant rise in prices? Will we have to focus on business travel or capitalize on leisure? What about the growing environmental awareness and its impact on our global definition of travel and transportation?

Building a commercial offer in the coming years will imply for a lot of us to start from scratch, and, as often, information will be the key success factor for an efficient rebound strategy.

There are 3 essential aspects to this:

1. What will the demand be?
2. What will be the competition status in terms of capacity?
3. What pricing strategy will they go for?

A solution such as Cayzn Tracking allows to gather millions of price points, supported by an advanced data quality check process and an intuitive graphical interface, to allow you to analyze your competitors behaviours. In addition, the alert module will allow you to immediately and efficiently prioritize the most critical situations. Other extended features are also coming, to offer you an even more cost-efficient solution.

For more information or to schedule a demo, visit our Competition Tracking section.