Travel analytics firm ForwardKeys has struck a deal with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) to include their global ticketing data in its portfolio of products and data services.
The addition of the air transaction dataset will help ForwardKeys to expand its current product offerings across customer segments in the tourism industry.
Global trade association IATA represents some 290 airlines, comprising 82 per cent of global air traffic. The company also operates the Billing and Settlement Plan, which facilitates and simplifies the selling, reporting and remitting procedures of IATA-accredited travel agencies in some 181 countries and territories, excluding the US.
ARC specialises in air travel distribution and intelligence, and provides channel-agnostic tools and insights to enable the diverse omni-channel retailing strategies of its customers. In 2019, ARC settled US$97.4 billion in transactions between airlines and travel agencies, representing more than 302 million passenger trips.
ForwardKeys will now receive a regular data feed of global ticketing transactions settled by IATA and ARC for travel agency bookings – including OTAs – as well as direct airline transactions. Customers will be able to search and query against all the segmentation and profiling criteria on the ForwardKeys platform.
ForwardKeys CEO Olivier Jager said: “This moment is like the completion of a jigsaw puzzle; we can now see the whole picture in complete detail rather than just part of it.”
He added that the partnership will help ForwardKeys’ customers “receive even more reliable market intelligence which will help them make better decisions.”
“Our mission is to serve our customers with versatile access to the right piece of information at the right time to help them understand and predict travellers’ impact on their business and this announcement represents a major enhancement to that capability,” he said.
