View the SlidesWatch hereThe airline industry was particularly devastated by COVID-19 when air traffic nearly grinded to a halt. Now passengers are starting to return, and their booking behavior has completely changed. We investigate what this new normal is going to look like and how airlines can prepare. PROS has access to a unique dataset of airline bookings attained from our customer base of dozens of carriers across the world. This has allowed us to create a global network of passenger booking flows that we have paired with other data sources such as epidemic rates and government movement controls. We’ve built ML models to identify signals airlines can look for indicating that passengers are soon to return, as well as the booking behavior of those returning passengers. We forecast returning passenger mixes under multiple recovery scenarios utilizing k-fold cross-validation, by employing linear models with regularizations (lasso, ridge, elastic net) for feature selection and importance, and also non-linear models (random forest) to capture the complex relationships.
