A customer value-based airline revenue management approach considering both opportunity costs and misclassification of heterogeneous clients

摘要

Owing to intense competition, not only airlines are interested in the establishment of long-term profitable customer relationships. However, clients can often not be classified into the appropriate customer segment (each characterised with a long-term customer value) unambiguously as only insufficient information is available at the time of decision for acceptance or denial of their requests. By considering (mis-)classification and evaluating the expected effects on revenues, we extend a bid price control that bases its decision on uncertain trend information about segment distribution and chooses that particular segment maximising expected value during opportunity costs comparison. Finally, we can show advancements both in quality of decisions and revenues compared with traditional methods via simulation.