Travel Space is combining an unusual set of technical challenges – mathematics, speed, accuracy, scalability. An additional issue has been increasingly putting pressure on travel technology companies: the size of data. With a joined effect of globalization, new flight destinations, low-cost flights, different points of sale, strong growth in Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific, data is growing – and this is just the beginning.

Storage is not the issue as capacity storage has been growing steadily in recent years (adding a few TB to an existing setup is cost efficient) – the challenge is how to access this mass set of data with sub-second timing and to “manage” this data in an efficient way. Big Data is becoming the stealth secret weapon of the Search Travel Space.

In 2010, The Economist published on its cover page “The data deluge” and as a natural answer, capital funding has been running to Big Data companies – with some funds having dedicated teams on this sub-component of Cloud Computing. And indeed – the challenge is up to the investment (and its return).

In one of the visionary Jules Verne’s books, ”Journey to the Center of the Earth”, this quote is striking – “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” When exploring the Big Data field, and in order to handle in a scalable way hundreds of billions of records, we did experiment. Vayant has tuned around a dozen different solutions and by mixing them in just the right way, we ended up relying solely on a mix of Non-SQL solutions. Yes, it works!

The complexity of the area is to ensure the proper alignment of three parameters: the hardware (the balance between cost, memory/drive/CPU), the Db/Storage architecture, and the software. I strongly believe the reason why we solved this challenge is because we gave our teams the chance to fail with different solutions until the right equation was found. They did not give up, they forgot the past, and they just cranked it out. As data is growing and as some of it expires, one key challenge is to manage past data – recycling it for efficiency.

Vayant’s latest FastSearch product is built on this philosophy – lightning fast to enable the most dynamic user interface – even if behind the scene searches trigger Terabytes of data processing and scanning. A natural roll-over is in motion, where we are migrating this to our core foundation OneSearch product for the benefit of our customers. If you can do it for one, it will work for the others.

About Big Data:

Tnooz published a set of interesting articles on BigData and Travel such as http://www.tnooz.com/2011/09/20/news/big-data-bringing-the-magic-back-to-travel-technology/ and http://www.tnooz.com/2012/01/04/how-to/big-data-and-the-infinite-possibilities-for-the-travel-industry/ – and their next Tnooz Live will be around this topic.

Following a recent update by Advito on their travel industry forecast for 2012, a key global problem for economic growth remains the global recession and the euro zone crisis.

The continued crisis in Europe is expected to result in airfare increase of only 3 percent.

There is also a tendency for airlines to reduce their capacities. They achieve that by reducing flight frequencies or eliminating flights to less lucrative markets. Lufthansa for example recently cut down its flights to India and American Airlines cut altogether their flights to Budapest and Helsinki, as well as the routes New York-Tokyo and Chicago-Delhi.

Delta is estimated to cut down its capacity by 8 percent for the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Central America. United Airlines will drop their capacity by 5 percent for flights to Latin America, Australia and the U.S.

The global increase of airfare demand according to IATA will be only 2.9 percent, compared to 4.2 percent in 2011 and 10.4 percent in 2010.

The regions with highest demand growth are Latin America (8.5 percent) and the Middle East (5.7 percent).

The implications are clear. In order to handle lowered demand expectations and underperforming markets, airlines need to optimize their markets, capacities and routes and concentrate on key markets.

An airline can’t hope to be everywhere and return a profit. Target markets need to be more clearly defined. At VAYANT we have estimated that around 80 percent of any supplier’s flights are within about 500 O&Ds, often much fewer.

If airlines analyze their most flown O&Ds they can optimize their airfare search and distribution costs as well.

Our new product VAYANT FastSearch is based on the concept of a definable and optimized airfare search environment that reduces overall distribution costs.

To achieve the astounding speed and accuracy of flight search results that we do, we ask our clients to specify their markets, days in advance to book a flight and a number of length-of-stay combinations. Within milliseconds our product returns sets of available and priced flights worldwide with about 80% bookability compared to traditional caching solutions that offer around 50%.

Market and route optimization is a must for airlines in order to be profitable. Any solution that aims to help reduce costs is worth considering. Especially if it adds value by introducing new search parameters.

Vayant Travel Technologies, the leading technology provider of innovative search and fare pricing solutions, today announced that, as part of the Company’s long-standing succession plan, its Board of Directors has unanimously named Eric Dumas to the position of Chief Executive officer.

Brian Clark, who has served as a Board Member of Vayant since October 2010 and as CEO since January 2011, will return to his full-time role as Partner at consulting firm Hudson Crossing, and will remain as a Board member at Vayant. Eric has been the COO of Vayant since April 2010.

“It has been my pleasure serving with such a talented group of people,” said Brian Clark. “Eric is a fantastic executive and technologist, and I look forward to continuing working with him as we roll out Vayant’s incredible airfare search product portfolio to the Industry”.

Together, Brian and Eric can point to extensive accomplishments in 2011, and have positioned the Company for strong growth going forward. 2011 included:

• The release of Airfare Intelligence, providing a real time snapshot of future airfares world-wide including all taxes and fare rules,
• The release of OneSearch 2.0, Vayant’s flagship product including World Wide Availability,
• The beginning of FastSearch, Vayant’s newest airfare search product with sub-second response times,
• The launch of production services for Vayant’s first clients,
• And the growth of a superbly talented team to nearly 50 employees.

In addition, 2012 promises to be a great year for Vayant. Two new, exceptional, clients will be announced shortly, and FastSearch will be released on schedule in April. No other independent airfare search platform can claim sub-second search on worldwide schedules, including availability.

“Continuity and persistence are the keys of Vayant’s success and I am delighted the Vayant Board has decided to nominate me” says Eric Dumas “With the fundamental rise of E-Commerce and mobile travel platforms the Vayant B2B product portfolio is step by step being recognized as the leading World Wide airfare search platform ensuring both cost effectiveness and flexibility. I look forward to keep growing our business as well as our technical excellence in the upcoming months.”

Sincerely,

Brian Clark and Eric Dumas, 2/29/2012.