Custom Booking Classes

Feature Roadmap
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1

What?

Booking classes split a (physical) cabin (which usually maps 1:1 to a service class like Economy or Business) into several sub-classes.

In AS, one would define a custom set of booking classes for the whole airline and likely already provide certain defaults (like the standard relative split). There can be up to 26 booking classes and each booking class needs to map to a service class (Eco, Business, etc).

Then one could set the available booking classes and their relative split per airport pair and/or per flight number. In inventory management, one could see and analyse booking numbers per booking class.

Why?

Booking classes allow more control over the capacity offered

They could also enable more advances features like more than one service class per physical cabin (“moving curtain”). The dynamic nature of this would likely also make it easier to introduce a new service class like Premium Economy after the grunt work of implementing booking classes has been taken care of.

When?

To realise the full potential of this feature, fares would need to be implemented.

2

Will this be the same as what was mentioned 8 years ago. Can’t remeber much except I was generally in favour. However I thought it was dropped due to comlpexities of implementation.

3

In principle, yes. Albeit as part of a bigger picture. Back then, we mostly focused on the booking classes and what would be Individual Travel Request Generation in the new system. This would have been a great improvement, but mostly due to the latter. The former would have added a lot of (interface) complexity for a fraction of the benefits.

The new booking classes will resemble their real-world counterparts much more closely, especially due to the introduction of fares (which we didn’t dare touching 8 years ago, I think mostly because I didn’t grasp the subject as well as I do today).