Airline seat inventory control benefiting from currency differentials to enhance revenues

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop an airline seat inventory control model which will capitalise on currency differentials that exist between city pairs. The approach taken here is to maximise Expected Marginal Seat Revenues as proposed by Belobaba for non-nested fare classes. the basic Expected Marginal Seat Revenue model is extended to explicitly include the effects of overbooking. Data from the South African Airways return flight between Cape Town and London is utilised to demonstrate the model.