Aan & Ups deDowns top Think about the following unimaginable situation: a small virus takes over your country and the government closes its borders almost completely. Safety requirements during a flight are heavily changed, the date of the reopening of the borders can be guessed by throwing darts and you are leading the pricing and revenue management department of KLM. How would you formulate your strategy to tackle this challenge? Maarten van der Lei will show us how this works at KLM! TEXT Bauke Wijnands DESIGN Stefano Dimastrapasqua
COPYRIGHT KLM
The flight of a ticket price The team
Having more than 20 years of working experience at KLM, Maarten has seen a lot of operational processes within the airline. He started as an operations research analyst, after which he joined the network planning department being busy with margin optimization. Here he was busy with questions like: where to place your assets, which destinations will we fly to, with which frequency? Hereafter, he joined the operations division, being responsible for the planning of the cabin crew. With his background as mathematical researcher, this could be typically seen as an assignment problem. However, SCOPE DECEMBER 2021
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union dynamics also became an important topic within this role, since employee planning deals with finding balance between work and private life. The next step in his career was in the commercial direction, being responsible for building a new (current) revenue management system. After having had various business related roles, Maarten is now leading the complete pricing and revenue team, having teams in Amsterdam and Paris. Aircraft seats as a perishable product
Within the pricing and revenue department of KLM, you have to deal with fluctuations of demand. Is that
a scaring fact? No, it’s not. The most important challenge as airline is that coping with these fluctuations requires another method than for example an ice-skates salesman’s method. That salesman can have extra skates in inventory in order to be sure that he’ll deal with the demand. Thinking about that analogy, an airline can’t ‘produce’ extra pilots or aircrafts for the short term. That forces KLM to find other ways to cope with fluctuations, by identifying the characteristics of the demand. For example, seasonality plays an important role. During the summer and the turn of the year leisure demand increases, while business travel shows
