Prepare for Takeoff:
Our Continued Investment in FLYR
By Adi Hemrajani, Senior Associate at WestCap
The digital commerce experience has made leaping strides over the past decade, and continues to rapidly transform virtually every sector. Thanks to advances in mobile, cloud computing, and most recently artificial intelligence (AI), consumers can seamlessly make purchases through social channels and even transact with voice commands. From buying a shirt to ordering tea, we have come to expect engaging, hassle-free, and personalized customer journeys as the standard. Yet, one industry has conspicuously failed to keep pace: travel and transportation.
Stagnant Systems
Even though travel is expected to account for nearly 12 percent of global GDP in the next decade – surpassing pre-pandemic peaks – its technology remains stuck in the past. It is an all-too-familiar predicament to have to stare at a flickering airport screen because a carrier’s app failed to update, to pick seats manually despite an airline having a record of our past choices to predict our preferences, or to spend hours on the phone dealing with customer service agents resolving seemingly simple issues. The way we discover, pay for, and manage flights, hotels, car rentals, and other travel logistics has hardly changed for decades. Prices, however, have soared, leaving consumers feeling shortchanged.
Digging deeper into the market, we learned that the travel sector is hamstrung by its underlying operational systems, which largely still run on technology originally created in the 1980s. Data is rarely, if ever, captured, and when it is, information is scattered across disparate storage and siloed tools. Reservation systems are archaic, and unable to deliver the delightful, intelligent, and smooth user experiences that consumers deserve. While these challenges have been abundantly evident for some time, solving them has been inherently difficult. The pervasiveness, complexity, and fragmentation of mission-critical software upholding the airline industry is such that airlines cannot settle for a minimum viable product — the slightest disruptions in pricing, forecasting, or order management can precipitate tens of millions of dollars in financial losses.
The time for innovation is now. Airlines and travel companies are facing unprecedented pressures to undergo an overhaul, as the gulf between their digital experiences and those of other industries widens. Since legacy players have not successfully addressed these needs, companies are ready for new solutions.
Modernizing the Travel Industry
Enter FLYR. FLYR is tackling these obstacles head-on to usher in a brighter future for travelers, by helping airlines and other travel companies upgrade their legacy commercial technologies with modern, AI-based offerings that facilitate superior customer experiences, and consequently, improved business outcomes.
FLYR provides airlines with a comprehensive, configurable reservation system that sits at the heart of their commerce operations. It allows airlines to connect to the travel retail ecosystem to generate tailored offers based on customer segmentation data, and then distribute them via API to any channel – direct or indirect – all without relying on prior technology or passenger service system (PSS) limitations. Replacing historically prevalent, inflexible PNR protocols, FLYR uses International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s ONE Order standards and extensible stock keeping to unify flights, trains, rental cars, hotels, and more into a single order number for customers and airlines to track and invoice across all partners consistently. Through self-service management of primary and third-party product catalogs and sales conditions, FLYR enables the customization and combination of flights and ancillaries (i.e., early boarding benefits, premium seats, meal selection, and other a-la-carte features) to build the perfect itinerary.
For more informed decision-making, FLYR has pioneered a single-pane-of-glass view across various commercial teams; these groups previously encountered frictions from disjointed workflows and did not speak to each other fluently. By utilizing deep learning neural networks for continuous price optimization, FLYR more accurately predicts revenue performance, load factors, and cancellations. With these applications and others, FLYR promises to bring airline purchases into the future, with dynamic offer flexibility and customer centricity that results in increased revenue, lower customer acquisition costs, and faster time-to-market. Critically, FLYR achieves this all while maintaining an open architecture to allow clients to augment its products with their own functionality, and ensures compatibility with partner airlines, agents, global distribution systems (GDS), and distributors still on legacy systems for smooth transitions.
Defining the Future of Travel
WestCap is proud to partner with the FLYR team as they power a new era of travel. In 2021, WestCap led the company’s $150 million Series C funding round, which it used to expand its product suite and develop its sales team. As a result, FLYR’s annualized recurring revenue (ARR) has grown by 290 percent over the past year, attracting customers including JetBlue, Avianca, Virgin Atlantic, The Boca Raton and Best Western Scandinavia, amongst others.
Today, we announced that we are leading FLYR’s $225 million Series D financing. FLYR plans to deploy this capital towards scaling its product development and go-to-market globally, serving more travel, transportation, and hospitality companies with cutting-edge commercial operating systems, AI-driven workflows, and enhanced retailing.
In the next phase of FLYR’s evolution, we’ll draw on our team’s knowledge and expertise building category-defining technology businesses in the travel ecosystem, including Airbnb, Hopper, Blueground, and Peek. We look forward to our work together with the FLYR team to fundamentally reimagine the commercial infrastructure of travel and to establish FLYR as a generational company.
