Churning
The churning is a situation when a booking agent reserves seats on a flight, which actually will not be used for further ticket issuance and will be returned to sale after time limit expires. Such “freezed” seats negatively affects availability display and sales.
The following situations are considered as churning:
- multiple bookings made by an agent without subsequent ticket issuance,
- shortly before the time limit expires or immediately after the time limit of the previous booking expires, the agent makes a new reservation on the same date and the same route.
The churning function allows to track such situations and report them to the inventory system operator by sending a message to the queue.
At any change in the status of the segment (new reservation creation or cancellation of the old one), the system starts searching for reservations similar to the one being analyzed according to matching criteria:
- - matching of segment data (flight, departure and arrival points, departure time);
- - matching of passenger data by name and date of birth.
For each found reservation which is similar to the original one, this process starts over again until no more similar reservations are found.
For bookings with active segments, similar bookings with canceled matching segments are searched, and vice versa - for an booking with canceled segments, similar booking with active segments are searched. Each pair of cancellations and reservations found is considered an attempted reservation, the number of such attempts is compared to the value of the Attempts count parameter.
As a result, a chain of all similar bookings found is formed, starting with the original booking. After that, all bookings are checked according to the following criteria:
- - segment information and the number of segments of two orders match;
- - name and date of birth of the passenger (at least one of those present in the order) match;
- - there are no tickets in the original booking (for none of the passengers on any segment);
- - more than 1 hour has passed since the creation of a similar booking (if the booking is canceled within an hour after creation, it is considered as made by mistake);
- - parameters of the booking agency specified in the settings match.
Bookings which do not match these criteria are excluded of the chain and are not considered as churning. Other thah these, all bookings left in the chain are considered as churning, and a message about these bookings are sent to the 308 queue.
The settings are made in the Integrity → Churning section.
The following parameters are set:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Time span | The time interval until the last change of the original booking, during which similar bookings are searched. Format: HH:MM. Example: value 01:00 means that search will be made within one hour until the last change of the original booking |
| Attempts count | The number of booking and cancellation pairs for the specified time range, after which a chain of similar bookings will be considered as churning and the system will send a message to the queue. The count includes re-bookings of each booking in the chain |
| Agent match rules | Combinations of criteria that will be compared to determine the identity of agents. When analyzing bookings, the system refers to POS, and if the specified data matches, bookings will be considered to be created by the same agent. Available comparison criteria:
|
 |
Save settings to apply them. |