Richard Ratliff is an executive scientist and research fellow at Sabre Labs. Richard found revenue management (RM) to be a good fit to what he had studied in graduate school – economics with an operations research emphasis. Throughout his career, Richard has worked for both airlines and vendors. On the airline side, Richard found “it’s really interesting to deal with managing the demand and controls for flights all the way from the time they’re first sold in the reservation system up until departure. You have the ability to vary prices and availability; then you can observe how those changes affect actual sales volumes.” However, Richard prefers working for a vendor “because I’m building the core models and decision support tools that are used by airline RM analysts and executives. I’m also able to spend more time on the scientific aspects and work with many different airline and hotel customers.”
Richard sees three big trends in RM. First, “There is a widespread recognition that modern RM is no longer an isolated, standalone function; RM teams today interact closely with counterparts in pricing, scheduling, air sales and marketing, distribution, loyalty, ancillary sales and other teams across the airline. Second, there is a growing trend towards customer personalization and personalized offers. Third, the growing scope and complexity of airline RM is driving the need for more advanced decision support models (using embedded machine learning with microservices) and more detailed data collection (plus integration with data sources in other marketing systems).”
For students interested in pursuing careers in RM, Richard recommends taking core classes in operations research and machine learning in addition to introductory courses in computer science and microeconomics. He also recommends students seek summer interns working with an airport, airline, or commercial vendor revenue management team.
Interested in learning more about Richard? Check out his LinkedIn page. One fact that Richard likes to share about the travel industry is that more than 10% of the world’s gross domestic product involves travel and tourism. The Sabre global distribution system (GDS) handles more than $250B in travel transactions each year involving more than 400 airlines, 70,000 travel agencies and 1M hotel properties. On a per-minute basis, Sabre’s GDS provides information on 140K flights and hotels to potential customers and sends more than 3,500 text messages to travelers!