Real implementations, real results: ATPCO’s Product Catalog solution in action

Doug: Greetings, everyone. My name is Doug Sharpe and I'm a Product Fellow at ATPCO. I lead the Product Catalog solution initiative there and we were hearing a lot of really fascinating topics revolving around data in motion. This session is going to lean a little bit more into offers in action. I will call out that there is a lot of data in motion within the Product Catalog solution. We had a very successful deep dive yesterday. It was a 2-hour deep dive. I think the attendance was, almost 200 of you were attending that. So I think we've gotten through some of the data in motion. Let's go into the offers in action, but before we go into, just to give some context and just set the table, let's talk about what is Product Catalog.  

Product catalog is an electronic record of potential products and services that might be offered by an airline or a third party. The key here is that it's absent of price. It's also not just allowing the airlines to define what they sell, but it's how they sell it. Is it standalone? Is it bundled, branded where they sell it, is it on special equipment, certain markets and then who they can sell it with? And that's where we get into interline journeys.  

The separation of product and price is essential for the price to be determined at time of shopping. This is done through dynamic pricing engines. So separating the two really allows the airline to define its products on one aspect of the offer being presented.  

And then the pricing is a separate discipline, but they all work together. In addition, we have settlement data that can be moved up to the time of shopping. Settlement data, as everyone in the room probably knows, happens at the very tail end of the process. We can flip that model on its head and actually use that settlement data as reference data to feed the interline offer constructions and in the dynamic pricing algorithms to make sure that those special prorate agreement revenues, that integrity, is maintained. You don't want the dynamic pricing to be undercutting yourself on what you're committed to in the special prorate agreements, for example.  

So where does Product Catalog sit in offer creation? So you have the, it sits squarely in the offer engine where it's constructing the offer. Think of the request that comes in, a shopping request comes in, be that through an AI agent or a travel agency or any other ways that the requests can come in. But the Product Catalog takes that context that's in that request and assembles the best product solutions that it can respond to.  

You also need a stock management discipline. We call that stockkeeper and offers and orders. That is maintaining your inventory. You've got to make sure that whatever you've assembled to present back to the customer is still available for sale. So think of that as the custodian of inventory for things like managing seat capacity and other ancillaries. Product Catalog has to interact with that stockkeeper. Product Catalog, think of it as where I define my products. Stockkeeper has to also have that same definition of products in it in order to synchronize the inventory. And last but not least is the pricing component of it. This is your dynamic pricing engine. It computes price in real time at the moment of shopping.  

And that is a, you take all three of these together, and this is, I'll just be honest, it's not an all inclusive list for how to create an offer. You've got itinerary builders, schedules, airline profiles, SRSIA agreements, all the other things that that go into that. But these are the ones that we're going to touch on a little bit today. So just wanted to set the stage for that.  

So with me today on the panel are three industry partners. We're all building out next gen offer and order capabilities and have interacted with ATPCO's Product Catalog solution. So welcome, panel, and thank you for being here. So let's just start with some quick introductions for the audience. Start with Javier.  

Javier: Yeah. Hi, everybody. I'm Javier Jimenez. I'm COO for Airnguru. I try to lead the team about our product strategy. So between NDC, modern airline retailing, and agentic AI, I have a lot of work try to understand how to build our product to work today, but also to be prepared for the future. So basically that's what I do all day.  

Gökçe: Hello everyone, this is Gökçe Evirgen from Turkish Technology. I'm the Head of Product in Turkish Technology, mainly responsible for the modern airline retailing platform. I'm excited to share our insights and experiences that we had the POC with ATPCO. Thanks for inviting me.  

Doug: Thank you.  

Justin: Yeah. And I'm Justin Jander. I lead our product management team for our offer solutions at PROS. And I feel like my journey at PROS is actually very similar to the journey that the industry is taking. Where I started out focused on revenue management. And now I have evolved into how the answer from revenue management goes into the offer side all the way to today where we're thinking about the evolution of revenue management into offer optimization. So I think that it follows really well and we're excited to talk about how that's going to fit together today.  

Doug: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks to all of you. So Javier, maybe we start with you since you're closest to me. As one of the Product Catalog first production customers. Tell us a little bit about your use of it, the use case that you employed, how it helped your customers? And how can a product catalog absent of price help improve dynamic pricing?  

Javier: Yeah, sure. So what we're doing is enriching the information that we already are providing to our customers with the product catalog. So with classic airfare data, it's a bit hard to understand what is the actual product that you're selling. And I think that has become a practice in the industry that pricing teams, they focus very much on what their prices are and how are they compared to the market, but they don't put too much attention to the product. Sometimes even a different team takes care of the product composition and another one of prices. And we have observed that is not efficient at all and far from optimal.  

So what we have done is to show the analysts the product composition that they have, how that compared to the market product offering. And also we have able to score that product composition so they can actually map what they have to what the market has and that enables them to take much better pricing decisions. So that's what we basically have built.  

Doug: OK, Thank you. It's very interesting. Gökçe. Your focus with catalog was slightly different. It was focused on augmenting your current offer order management system that you're in build with supplier catalogues that were curated and distributed by ATPCO. Can you tell us about your experience during the proof of concept and share any insights or learnings with the audience on that?  

Gökçe: Sure. Of course, during the POC, our primary goal was not just to test an API integration, but it was to truly understand whether two different catalog approaches can work together in a scalable and sustainable way. From technical perspective, the POC I can say gave very positive results. We validated the end-to-end flow of the catalog like including creation updates, bidirectional data exchange via intake and subscription APIs. We also validated and confirmed that the data integrity is preserved throughout the life cycle of the product catalog, which is very critical for a production-grade system.  

However, our main insights were beyond these technical results. First of all, yesterday in the product session, Melanie also mentioned, we realized that it is very important to keep the balance between the standardization and the flexibility. Standardization is very important, actually. ATPCO provided a well structured model which is very critical for alignments and interoperability. However, when you want to add any product type or if you want to extend the attributes, it needs some coordination which makes you, how can I say, inhibits you to make innovation in this case, because as an airline you need to be innovative and you need to move fast. So as a result, I can say that it is very positive to make an POC.  

But when you look at it in scale, if you want to run this in production, it is more than just making the integration. It is more on the standardization, flexibility, and data alignment. It needs to be like that and this will guide us in the next steps. Yes, we call it standards with flexibility and we definitely want to remove any friction and we want the airlines to be able to implement their products in a very quick fashion, if you will.  

Doug: Exactly. I agree with that. Justin, how you doing down there? Last year PROS and ATPCO successfully exchanged catalogs. We did a proof of concept, we did a press release, it was in an IATA forum. You're continuing to heavily invest in offer order management systems and actively build out your offer creation infrastructure, which includes many of the aspects of using catalogs, merchandising with enriched bundles, stockkeeper, and dynamic pricing. Some of the, on the earlier slide, you're touching on all three of those and merchandising. Can you tell us more about how you envision Product Catalog helping you gain momentum in this space?  

Justin: Yeah. So I think it's interesting because, first off, I said at the beginning, I'm a revenue, revenue management guy moving into the offer optimization space. That's great, right? So why am I here talking about Product Catalog? And the reason is, is that if we want to make the best, optimal offer for the passenger, then it really helps to know what I can actually offer to the passenger and all of the things that go with that.  

And it seems really fundamental, right? Like we're talking about coming up with a product catalog here. And for many industries, this is table stakes. They've had the product catalogs for many years. But for us, we're really catching up. Think about the, I talked to airlines around the world that have their products are spread out across different parts of the organization. You could say upgrades are handled by the airport. And so they're completely separate from the team that manages the offers in the revenue management space.  

And so with all of this kind of disjointedness that's going on, there's an opportunity there to say, well, we have to consolidate that into a single place where you have a true understanding of what I can offer to the passenger and then stockkeeper being the single place to know how many of those things that I can offer to the passenger. And if I combine those together, now I can actually make a good offer, not just an offer consisting of whatever things my part of the airline runs, right. That's not a true picture of the offer optimization that we want to achieve.

And really that focuses just on the first-party ancillaries, right. The opportunity to sell more from the third-party perspective, whether you want to sell airline socks to your most loyal passenger or something that, all the other things that you might actually want to sell to a passenger, those are opportunities you have. And really all of it consists of what the offer is that you want to make for your passenger.  

And so when we think about it from the PROS side, we have the science. If you know PROS, you know that we've been in the data science business for over 40 years. That's been the fundamental piece. But now we can come up with the best science. But if you don't tell the science what is in the offer, then you don't really have the best science. And so that's really the fundamental piece that we've got to get right so that then our data scientists can actually know what to create that offer with. And so that's really an important part. And we have to get that first part right before we can go into the full offer optimization side. And so that's why I think it's a critical piece as we start thinking about this as it evolves, it's really important.  

Doug: Yeah. And it demonstrates the importance of proof of concepts engaging with each other and making sure the data is flowing and it's all working and everything's getting optimized. So thank you for that.  

So you're all in various stages of proof of concepts or early production. The industry is watching. There are still airlines and partners in this room deciding whether to engage or not. This is a slide that we used yesterday in the deep dive. It is from a November 2025 study, but it was saying at the time that there was 72% of the airlines polled recognized the importance of offers and orders, that offers and orders are the future. However, only 27% had actually begun the transformation programs, which is a whopping 45% gap in, It's not a gap in belief, it's a gap in action.  

And we think that the next three years at least are the critical window for everyone developing the systems getting all that, how it all works together, getting the standards out there, proof of concept learnings, all of those activities are all going to happen in the near term, I would say. And that the critical window will show what airlines are willing to scale and be ready for offers and orders.  

So I want to lean into to this a little bit. Gökçe, I'll start with you. So Turkish Airlines is one of the largest carriers in the world and you've been in this POC end-to-end, I would say. But from your experience, what happens to your offers if the catalog isn't right? And what does the industry need to make that exchange work reliably?  

Gökçe: That's a very important question because catalog is often underestimated. However, it is the foundation of everything in airline retailing. I can say that if your catalog is not right, your offers will not be right. It is that simple. And from our experience, we have seen that even small inconsistencies in the catalog like unclear product definitions or missing attributes, misaligned rules, can lead to how the offers are constructed. So, which can lead to incorrect pricing or inconsistent customer experience. So even offers that are technically valid but commercially meaningless.  

So and the problem doesn't stop here because offers are not isolated, they are flowing into orders, delivery, settlement, reporting, everywhere. So if your catalog has issues, this problem will spread across the entire value chain.  

Another key impact is on the consistency of how your data is defined. Because how your attributes are defined really has the impact when you are trying to make the integration, while you are trying to align with another system. After some point if your data models are not aligned, then it will become like mapping work and very complex operation actually.  

So in short, I can say that a weak catalog leads to unreliable offers, inconsistent customer experience, and also operational complexity.  

And let's come to our second question, what does the industry need? As I mentioned in the previous answer, standardization for interoperability, flexibility for innovation, and data modeling for alignment. It is very important. And toward the industry currently moving to event-driven architecture, real-time architecture. So offers are becoming more dynamic and your product catalog needs to support this responsiveness.  

And finally, I think we need a mindset shift. So industry should look at the catalog as not a static data repository but a strategic capability.  

Doug: Thank you. Innovation, standards, flexibility, these are all things that ring true with the catalog and its future.  

Justin, PROS works with airlines across the globe on dynamic pricing and offer management. Modern airline retailing requires airlines, technology partners, and distribution systems to exchange product catalogs seamlessly. From where you sit, what's the state of that today, and what's still missing?  

Justin: Yeah. So I think largely, we've got the IATA working groups, we've heard that referred to in a couple of the other panels already today. Those are doing a really good job of bringing the industry together and having people talk about what the standard should be. And it's not just the IATA ones. There's a lot of different groups that are talking about standards. But one problem with having a lot of groups talk about standards is it sounds like you might end up with multiple standards and then it's not a standard anymore.  

So I think what really has to happen is we have to admit where we are in the industry. You have to have something like these working groups establish the broad standards, the big picture, But then when it really comes down to is you have to do something. I think that's what it really amounts to.  

And that's where the POC that we did last year with ATPCO really mattered because we said we want to build a product catalog. We need the information that ATPCO has. And so instead of just talking about what is the standard of the data exchange, we work together, we exchange the data between each other, and made it happen in reality. And I think that's the key that has to start happening is the standards are going to be important. We have to remember those as we start doing the POCs, but also we need to do something. I think that that's one of the hardest parts about this is that we get sort of analysis/paralysis situation that happens, right? And so if we can really start focusing on doing the work, you start making that progress that we need to make towards the solution.  

And even from the PROS perspective, we've had for a long time, we called them connectors where we took one vendor's data source or one airline's data source and turned it into the format that we need. Now that sounds really 2005, right? You have to take their data, do some coding to turn it into the data format you need. But in today's world, agents and AI are all over this sort of thing. You can make those mappings, design that code really quickly. So rather than focus so much on the standard of converting it from X format to Y format, you leverage AI to build those capabilities for you. And that's where we can move faster in these. And then they can evolve, right? You don't have to have this exact predefined standard between these.  

Now again, I'm not disputing that you need standards in some cases, but when it gets down to it, an example being the POC that PROS did with ATPCO. This is the opportunity to say, let's not wait around until the standard is defined, let's define it as we do that work together. And that's what POCs are for. That's exactly the point of them. And so we've seen a lot of success with that and that's where the opportunity lies I think in the industry is making sure that the POCs take us to that next step. It can't just be, let's define the standard and then it's ready to go and we're going to have to do it together and work as an industry.  

And that brings up, of course, the hot topic, one of the hot topics, is always modularity, right? This gets to where can different vendors work together, because ultimately you have to work together. There's the airline needs the power to choose what solutions they want from different places. And so vendors have to be modular in order to bring those capabilities together. And so that's why it's important that these POCs establish that modular component between them.  

Doug: I agree and I think the advent of AI to do gap analysis between standards, to do all those things that have taken time to accelerate outcomes, I think could also be of a big help. Absolutely, we'll see that in the future. Thank you.  

Javier, this your POC demonstrates the value without requiring full offer and order transformation. How important is that for airlines who are mid-journey in their retailing journey?  

Javier: Yeah, I think it's been really important to start implementing this in production. I think ATPCO did a great job synchronizing actual production data into the product catalog, because if you think about it, this is the first product catalog that you can actually use in production. And we did exactly that. And I think the biggest value that we're gaining out of it is a, we're changing the systems around it because the future products that we need to build for airlines to be able to manage modern airline retailing, it's they are going to be much more focused on the product. So I completely agree with Justin, that's going to be very important.  

So of course, we at Airnguru, our mindset is we need to build systems that are not only going to optimize prices, are going to optimize the product itself, the product composition. Which is great because I always felt bad about working in revenue management all my life. And all I did was try for you to get as much as you can for a product. Now it's about building the right product, the product you want. So it's great. It's going to be a revolution in revenue management.  

So what we're seeing is implementing the product catalog in actual production. We're seeing how not only systems, but the process itself is changing. The mindset of the analysis is going to change towards trying to understand what is the best product they can build in order to satisfy demands.  

And we are giving that visibility on this first stage, which is great, and then we will start applying other things. We are talking about a lot about agentic AI. Actually having transparent information about what your product is and what is out there in the market will allow these agents to give you much better suggestions about what you need to do with your pricing strategies. So I think that's great. I think we're going in the right direction there.  

Doug: Yeah. And we did that sprint from ideation to production in 90 days. It was a very fast sprint. We did together.  

Javier: Thanks to some AI.

Doug: Thanks to that, but it goes back to what Justin was saying. You got to get in there and just start going and start building and start learning and evolving. Great.  

So now let's round out the discussion, maybe with one last question for each of you. We have about 5 minutes left. Javier, what would you say to airlines or technology partners who are still on the fence about engaging with a product catalog solution now?  

Javier: I think it links to the other question. I think the value that they will gain, it's understanding. It's start adapting their teams to this new mindset, right? And I think integration is easier with a product catalog synced to production data. So I think that's the key. So I would, I would recommend, if you have the time and resources, which I don't think is much, try to connect with vendors or maybe your own systems and, and you have a team internally that can do it. Try to integrate this data and try to start getting value out of it. And I would say take advantage of that linkage between classic fare data and the product catalog that ATPCO is offering.  

Doug: OK, very good. Especially important since we have to live in the two worlds at the same time. We have to build that bridge. We need the bread crumbs between the catalog and the what we call the traditional data, you called it classic. That's fine. It has a lot of a lot of current data. We can call it as well, but thank you for that.  

Gökçe, for other airlines watching from the sidelines, what would you tell them about why now is the time to engage with this?  

Gökçe: I would say you don't need to wait for a full transformation to start engaging with the product catalog. One of the main benefits we received from this POC was it's moved us from assumptions to real insights, actually. We saw what we have done good, what needs to be improved, and what needs some alignment. So airlines can also see that if they engage early.  

And also we have moved from uncertainty to a more reliable road map. So how early you engage with this then you will get a more reliable road map in this case.  

And something that I would like to add is this is an ecosystem effort. Actually the more airlines start engaging with this, then we can move forward faster all together.  

Doug: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.  

And Justin, where does this go in the next two to three years, that timeline that we showed on that other slide and what becomes possible for airlines once catalog stockkeeper, dynamic pricing are all working together?  

Justin: Yeah. So I think I'll start with an analogy. If you're remodeling a house, nobody gets really excited about the plumbing part of the remodel, right? Nobody's excited about thinking about what the plumbing is going to look like. But if you don't do that part when you're doing the remodel, it probably isn't going to be very good what you see in the end. I won't get into details of what happens if you don't consider the plumbing, but things can go really poorly in your new house.  

And so the same idea is here. Within a year, we need to be very clear on what product catalog and stockkeeper are doing. And from the PROS side of things, that's exactly why we're accelerating our investment so that we're done by the end of the year with our first version of catalog and stockkeeper and the offer construction piece. Because then it sets us up for the next two to three years of now starting to give the power back of the airlines to think about how do you actually want to create a strategy around those offers.  

And this is where today you have very siloed organizations at the airline. You have a revenue management department that's largely focused on the right-to-fly pricing piece. You have maybe a department that does ancillaries and maybe one or two analysts that work on that. This is where you start bringing all of this together so that you can think about the strategy of what it looks like in the end state for the airline. And in order to get to that end state, we have to have this plumbing worked out so that you can actually deliver on that end state that you want in the offer that you create.  

So I see that as really the next two to three years is getting to the point where we get this stuff done that's the table stakes so that then we can move on to really creating the offers and creating the organizational structure that's necessary at the airline to deliver on that.  

Doug: Yep, I agree.  

And for any, as we mentioned yesterday in the deep dive, any airline that is not even on an offer order management system, your partner airline may be on an offer order management system and they may need your supplier catalogs. ATPCO can transform and curate catalogs based off the current data and we can distribute that to those partners. So even if you're not going towards the track on offer order management, you can still distribute catalogs. And I would encourage you to speak to myself, Melanie, the Product Catalog team is all here throughout the conference, but we're running out of time.  

Thank you so much for your insights and your learnings and your participation and your partnership throughout  this last year and all the exciting things that we're working on together. We're shaping the future together, not just thinking about it. We're actually in that higher, or that lower percentage of actually taking action. We have a Product Catalog breakout session this afternoon. They repeat, Melanie and I'll be hosting that. If you want to learn more about some more use cases, a deeper dive in that.  

And thank you, thank, thanks to the panelists as well. Thank you.  

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