Airbus’ Skytra reveals Kiwi.com as data supplier as COVID-19 drives demand for flight bookings and pricing intelligence
Kiwi.com provides Skytra’s flight ticketing database with price checks from more than 100 million daily searches on its online travel platform
Complementary data from Kiwi and IATA power world’s largest source of flight ticketing information, developed by Skytra for unique insights into airline revenue, flight pricing and future booking trends
29 July, 2020, London, UK – Skytra, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Airbus, reveals today that the second key data provider to its unique flight ticketing database is the online travel platform Kiwi.com. Price checks from Kiwi.com help power Skytra’s unrivalled market intelligence for an air travel industry that is hungry for insights as it navigates the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kiwi.com generates more than 2 billion price checks per day on its online platform and those of its partners, fed by connections to Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and direct Application User Interfaces (APIs) with most airlines worldwide.
Skytra has developed a unique method, for which a patent is pending, to match the offered ticket pricing from Kiwi.com with complementary transaction data received from the International Air Travel Association (IATA). The resulting flight ticketing information database is the world’s largest, allowing Skytra to take individual ticket-level detail and aggregate it into insightful data for air travel companies and financial institutions.
Leveraging the depth and breadth of its database, Skytra has built a suite of data-led intelligence tools covering airline revenue, pricing and forward bookings – areas where the market has traditionally had limited visibility – which can be tailored to customer needs. The database covers flights provided by airlines globally, giving granular insights to airline revenue managers, investors and analysts on future company performance relative to industry peers. Airports and tourism organisations can harness Skytra’s ticket level data for improved resources and facilities planning as COVID-19 travel restrictions ease.
Skytra expects the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to decide in the third quarter on its application to be the regulated Benchmark Administrator for the family of global air travel Price Indices that it has developed. The company’s ambition is to enable the air travel industry to manage revenue risk for the first time through a new class of financial instruments priced by these indices.
Mark Howarth, Skytra CEO commented: “Kiwi.com’s price checks are a key data input which helps make our ticketing database so unique and powerful. COVID-19’s devastating impact on the air travel industry has created a huge appetite for the granular data and insights our new business intelligence products provide. More longer term, the pandemic has highlighted the urgency of bringing risk management tools to market as the air travel industry starts to re-build.”
Oliver Dlouhý, Kiwi.com CEO commented: “We originally built our unique flight data acquisition and processing platform to solve the consumers’ problem of how to get from A to B in the most efficient way possible. We are pleased that our sophisticated technology will now also provide the right solutions for the whole industry.“
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About Skytra
Skytra Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airbus based in London. It was established in 2019 to produce new air travel indices and to launch and operate a regulated trading venue. Skytra works in close partnership with air travel and financial market experts to develop new risk management instruments for the benefit of the entire air travel industry. To learn more, visit http://www.skytra.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @SkytraMarkets.
About Kiwi.com
Kiwi.com was founded in 2012 by Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi. The travel tech company was created for travelers by travelers. Its proprietary algorithm – Virtual Interlining – allows users to combine flights and ground transportation from more than 800 carriers, including many that do not normally cooperate. Kiwi.com powers more than 100 million searches every day and employs 2,000 people worldwide.
Media Contacts
Skytra
Simon Packard, MHP Communications
Fixed line: +44 20 3128 8835
[email protected]
Kiwi.com
Carol Barnes, Head of Global Communications
[email protected]