考量機位後期銷售管道之航空營收管理問題

Abstract

航空機位具有不可儲存性，當班機起飛後空位將會形成浪費。後期銷售機制不僅將機位做更有效運用，也因航空業低邊際成本特性，多數票價收入能成為利潤，此即為營收管理問題的一環。本研究利用過去較少探討的其他銷售管道販售促銷機位，並藉此最大化收益、提供座位切出時間及數量決策。實驗中假設單一航段、單一客艙、固定價格的情境，並沿用旅客選擇模式，以動態規劃方式求解找出最大預期收益、適宜的座位切出時間與配置數量。研究發現切出時間與數量對於營收皆有影響，另外此銷售機制在不同旅客組成的班機具有不同效果，透過需求面的比較也能發現同樣現象。

As airline seats belong to perishable assets, empty seats would become wastes as the flight takes off. Late-stage alternative sales channel not only helps utilize the capacity, also, due to the properties of airline industry that serving additional passenger cost little, most part of ticket revenue would become profit thus lead to revenue increase. In this research, we use second sales channel to offer the late-stage deals, and our objective is to maximize the revenue, also to determine the appropriate time to allocate the seats to the second channel and the amount to offer. We considered one-leg, single class in economy with fixed priced fare classes scenario. By customers’ choice behaviors, we use dynamic programming to find out the maximum expected revenue. The experiment results indicate that the time of opening additional channel, seat allocation will influence the revenue. We also found that it’s a stable sales mechanism with better performance on numerical simulation. In addition, different demand compositions will have different effects when providing alternative sales mechanism, same finding can be found when comparing different demand scenarios.