Aviation has an ever-changing market landscape, which can often make navigating the muddy waters of supply and demand a challenge for airline planning and revenue management teams.
Data timeliness is essential to spotting the right opportunities before the competition. But with airline schedules in constant flux, analysts have to regularly run the same reports and look for changes. This has created a growing need to visualize changes as they take shape. Dynamic maps and graphics combined with alerting capabilities should be the next step in the digital transformation of internal network planning departments to make problems and areas for growth easier to see.
How are you crafting the story of your airline or airport with data? Are your tools and processes enabling you to act quickly and make decisions with reliable information?
With airlines announcing new routes every day, the pressure if on to streamline analysis and strengthen decision making.
At Routes Americas 2020, Indianapolis International Airport (IND) announced new routes to Nashville, St Louis, and Pittsburgh with Contour Airlines.
“Indiana is a natural fit for Contour Airline’s growth,” said Matt Chaifetz, chief executive officer of Contour. “We look forward to employing Hoosiers and bringing Indy travelers nonstop service to key business and leisure markets.”
We created a deep dive infographic on IND to visualize some of the essential data points an airline could use to validate IND as a smart investment.
Download full infographic: Data Deep Dive Into IND
From this data, we had several key takeways:
- When we looked at the most recent available US DOT data, the overall demand to IND increased by nearly 175K passengers.
- For the same timeframe, capacity is also slightly up, by over 50K seats.
- Several carriers have reduced capacity at IND during this timeframe, including the largest carrier serving the airport, Southwest Airlines, reducing by over 143K seats. The capacity reduction was offset by Delta Airlines increasing over 180K seats, and new entrant to the market, Spirit Airlines, adding over 160K seats.
- Looking at the schedule from October through July 2020, there is a steady increase in the year over year capacity at IND.
- The carrier changes can be clearly seen, reflected in the overall capacity share at IND for October 2019 through July 2020.
- There are still a number of markets with strong demand not served from IND.
“Indianapolis International Airport has a very stable market with minimal YOY change,”said Jim Ogden, aviation market expert at Cirium.“Southwest Airlines shrank a tiny bit—most likely due to the Boeing Max 737 grounding—and Spirit Airlines started service.”
