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RESEARCH

YIELDIN is recognized by the French Research Ministry as JEI, Young Innovative Company

We thrive to develop our service to diverse sectors such as buses, trains and hotels.

    BUSES

    TRAINS

    HOTELS

    PRINT

Price Elasticity Differential

Ancillaries Tool

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BUSES

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TRAINS

Rail and Airlines industries show similarities. If interregional rail routes do not usually face much competition, flights compete with intercity trains for rail travel ranging from 2 to 5 hours, typically for a Paris-Marseille or Paris-London. Price are alike even if Airlines price ranges are wider. Both industries have been impacted by low cost players and prices and RM decisions can not be taken anymore without paying attention to both competitor moves and customer demand pressure.

Yris have been designed to cope with fast moving environment and gives you all the weapons to compete with aggressive Airlines or Rail competitors. Like any RM system, it forecasts your demand, but being very innovative it also controls demand pressure by measuring web demand. Thus, it understands when low sales come from too high prices or simply from a lack of demand.

Yris gives clear visions of your markets. It takes pricing decisions according to both company internal data and market ones. It is intuitive and Business oriented. 

It reacts fast to any change on the market, is flexible and can be easily adapted to any new tactical or strategic decisions.

 Yris methodology is a combination of smart inventory management with smart dynamic pricing. If your route finds itself on a very competitive market, you would probably use more smart Dynamic Pricing rules and strategies adapted to macro objectives. If your route find itself on a niche market, you would probably use more smart Inventory Management rules. 

- We are looking for a partner company to continue our researches and customise Yris concepts to the rail industry -

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HOTELS

Yieldin has worked on developing Ancillaries Dynamic Pricing tool for Airlines and believes future RM tools should integrate core and ancillaries revenue optimisation.  If core resource prices are very high, ancillaries represent additional revenue, but during low season when core resources prices are very low, ancillaries will account for a large revenue share; by missing a potential customer, Hotels would then spill not only core but also Ancillary revenue. By fighting for any additional customer, Hotels will get the financial option to sell Ancillaries.

Hotels should look for Total RM. Ancillaries should be perceived by customers as services not as costs. This is why RM should integrate some marketing principles and move from a one to all to a one to few RM.

Unlike within Airlines, Hotel chain RM is not centralised. Therefore it is almost impossible for headquarter to challenge each individual  hotel RM relevancy. Yieldin has developed a rewind tool that analyses past data and shows clearly dilution and spoilage instances. We could customise it so that it would give headquarter the ability to better assess how well is doing RM in each of its hotels. 
Independent hotels managers are not specialist of Revenue Management. They may hesitate to invest in complex RM systems, that they would consider not enough transparent and maybe far from their own internal tactics and business vision. 

However, there are on the market some systems that have simplified Hotel RM and show easy to understand recommendation.  But they may be a little too much correlated with competitor prices, and thus their recommendations a little disconnected from Hotel internal tactics or business vision. This is why we believe Yris concept, which follows a business logic, which not only reacts fast but also can be adapted very easily and transparently to top management strategic objectives and moves, can be customised for either Independent hotels or Independent hotel RM consultants.

- We are looking for a partner company to continue our researches and adapt our concepts to the hotel industry -

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PRINT INDUSTRY

To price an offer in the digital printing industry is not an easy thing. Printing a book requires to combine of a lot of ingredients and services. Therefore if each request is different, there is no average product, and thus no average price.

The final product depends a lot on ingredients used. Logically, the printing industry uses cost plus pricing and applies a margin on each ingredient to derive the offer total price. During negotiation process, salesmen decide the final margin using their experience or peer pricing tools which recommend prices according to average margins made on similar past offers converted in sales. But each customer is different too, from a private individual printing his memoirs in low volume to professional publishers printing in bulk.  Points of references are difficult to scale.

In order to meet this challenge, Yieldin has started to develop a solution that should be able to answer the following questions:

Are historical margins efficient ?

Would we have still converted the offers in sales if we would have proposed an higher price?

Would we have converted more requests in orders by decreasing margins? 

In order to recommend the best price for a print offer, we have developed a series of modules that support printers in knowing better their demand and their commercial and production performances. 

 
We are now researching about how to steer the margins on each micro request according to top management macro tactics and strategies and how to adapt offer prices according to the printers occupancy rate forecast. This could end up in a real RM and Dynamic Margin solution for digital printers.

- We are looking for partners to continue our researches in Dynamic Pricing for Digital Printers -

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PRICE ELASTICITY DIFFERENTIAL

Today monopolies tend to disappear. Competition is strong, customers are more and more volatile and price sensitive. Prices can sometimes be hysteric. It becomes then crucial to know how to position prices and how to react to any price moves of your competitors, understand when it is necessary to match and when it is not. Nowadays, to decrease the price by 100 € has not at all the same impact if in the same time your competitor decreases its price by 150 € or only by 50 €. Thus the Price Differential Elasticity measures the variation of sales volume according to price gaps between company own prices and the competitor’s ones.

Yieldin runs many research on the concept of Price Differential Elasticity. From our research  in the travel industry, we have understood that Price Differential Elasticity is very contextual and can vary according to the competitor, the seasonality, the price level and time between purchase and departure.  

We measure Price Differential Elasticity by combining Sales, Competitor Prices and Web Demand data.

At Yieldin we believe this concept can be very promising for better pricing , not only in the Travel and Hospitality industry but also in every industry for which online sales represent a large share of total sales.

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ANCILLARIES TOOL

Because of the emergence of low costs players in the airline, bus, rail and even hotel industries, Ancillary Revenue is in vogue.

RM and Dynamic Pricing is a standard for those industries. Can they apply the same technics for managing Ancillary Revenue? Would RM principles designed for core revenue optimisation work also for Ancillary Revenue Management? Would for instance customers answer positively to a slight decrease in checked bag price?

Yes if they need a checked bag, not if they don’t. 

Indeed, if Ancillary represents a potential revenue for companies, it represents a expenditure in return to a service for customers. In order to be interested in an Ancillary price offer, customer must first need the optional service. A business man going for a day return journey will obviously not be interested in checking one luggage, even for free. Therefore, and in order to optimise their Ancillary revenue, companies will have to segment their offer. Appropriate RM tool for Ancillary Revenue should research on how to mix Dynamic Pricing and Marketing. Yieldin has began to work on this challenge. 

 
We have developed a tool that forecasts  Ancillary Revenue, average per seat and average take up. In case of  a gap with ancillary budget, it allows to easily understand if it is due to a bad performance in passengers or in ancillary take up or price.

We are looking for partners to continue our researches in Ancillary RM and Dynamic Pricing.

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