Scale Matters: GDS Air Shopping

Air shopping is a major product investment for Global Distribution Systems (GDS). Its purpose is to support the timely processing of high volumes of shopping transactions and provide quick responses to travel agent shopping requests, ensuring their productivity remains unaffected. A typical air shopping deployment involves hundreds of servers to handle the large number of requests from travel agents. Prior to the pandemic in 2020, air shopping volumes had been steadily increasing with an average year-over-year growth of 60%–100%. The air shopping process consists of four main components: schedule generation, itinerary selection, booking class availability, and itinerary pricing. This chapter explores the complexities of the air shopping process, low fare efficacy, schedule-led and fare-led algorithms, itinerary pricing, performance measures for shopping, and its impact on adjacent systems such as airline reservations inventory control. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how new distribution capability affects GDS air shopping.