Fares Assist is our flagship product and is used in over 250 sites worldwide.

Fares Assist is used both in-house and online, and provides the mechanism to power some of the most innovative and recognised internet booking sites in both the U.K. and European travel arena.

The database is one of the most advanced and innovative nett fares systems available today, designed to reduce the time taken to maintain airfares and enhanced over the years to incorporate many features enabling the user to make complex contract changes in the minimum amount of time.

Our Internet booking tool is both comprehensive and state-of-the-art, giving you a choice of content, design and functionality. It also allows you to manage your own fees and options and to change them quickly if required to keep up with this ever-changing industry.

Key features of the Fares Assist product are:

Fare Loading

• Quick to load & maintain fares
• Fully populated structured master files (e.g. airlines, airports, countries etc).
• Multiple classes, gateways, airlines and code shares.
• Support open Jaw and mixed class fares
• Supports both scheduled and charter fares
• Flight allocations
• Add-ons library for domestic departures and arrivals
• Rules and terms & conditions library for changes/cancellation fees etc.
• Apex and late purchase restrictions.
• Ticketing deadlines, before and after departure date.
• Blackout dates, restrictions and any applicable surcharges.
• Stopover details i.e. airports, number of stops, free stops, direction, nett/gross cost.
• Handles one way, return, circle trips and round-the-world fares.
• Sell-ups to higher fares and classes may be loaded at the same time.
• Specific flight numbers (both valid and invalid) per sector.
• Special ticket types, e.g. youth, senior citizen fares.
• Special fare types e.g. agent, public and corporate fare levels.
• Global Update Wizard allows rapid amendments and large-scale changes.
• A suite of built in routines permits alteration of any aspect of an existing airline contract.
• Contract cloning - just amend relevant areas and re-save with a new reference, a huge advantage when loading large complicated contracts such as KLM, Air France etc.
• Powerful mark-up and administration options for web sites
• Fees maintenance for transaction and booking fees.
• XML hand-off record to power websites

Fare Display

• Fully validating database - only fares valid for sale are shown
• Negotiated, Published and No-Frills fares may be displayed on the same screen
• Fares may be displayed as Nett, Gross or MSP - on a per user or system wide basis.
• Fares may be marked up to various sales levels (e.g. agent, public and corporate).
• Transaction fees can be displayed or included in the fare based on airline, class type and class
• Fares may be loaded and viewed in multiple currencies.
• Fares can be colour-coded for ease of viewing.
• Produce detailed quotations and fare calculations from your enquiry results.

Report Production

• Enquiry Analysis reports to monitor staff performance and travel trends may be used for marketing purposes.
• Fares lists enable you to print details or a summary of all your negotiated deals.
• Daily contract activity to give details of all contracts loaded on a particular date.
• Contract expiry report shows a list of contracts due to expire on a particular date.
• User defined reports can be designed by you.

There are various different aspects to the way the Fares Assist product can be implemented, these are listed below with a summary of each option.

Fares Assist - Desktop

The desktop application is used by the office where the fare loading takes place. The application is split into two distinct areas:

Maintenance

The maintenance section allows entire airline contracts to be loaded and the air fares database to be updated with the minimum amount of effort. It incorporates numerous user-friendly components specifically designed to make the task of loading air fares a less laborious process.

Fares Assist allows one airfare to be loaded and cloned from, amending only the relevant details. This innovative feature dramatically reduces the amount of time needed to be spent inputting and updating data.

Once contracts have been loaded, changes can be made either individually or globally. The Global Update feature enables multiple fares to be selected and changes made to any aspect of them in one easy step.

Enquiry

The Enquiry side of the system is a powerful sales tool that enables staff - even those with little or no experience - to quote fares with confidence, Fares Assist is a fully validating database and therefore only displays those fare that are valid for the criteria that has been entered.

Matching fares are displayed in a user-friendly format on a single screen with comprehensive details for each fare easily accessible if required. Fares can be displayed in different currencies and can be marked up or down according to user requirements.

This coupled with the ability to load customer specific contracts onto the same database as general fares and also to display published fares and no-frills fares, creates a powerful tool for ensuring that the best rates are quoted to corporate clients.

Built into the Enquiry side of the system is a booking wizard which takes the user through the process of booking either a nett, published or no-frills fare via the use of simple to use screens that allow selection of outbound & inbound flights, mandatory items (e.g. received, customer names etc...), special requests and remarks. User specific entries that may be required to drive a PNR into a back office system can also be prompted for and entered by the user. Bookings made can be queued to specific branches and specific queues if required.

Fares Assist Online

Fares Assist Online has been designed as a simple alternative to the Enquiry part of the desktop software for implant offices / home-workers and is accessed via the Internet. A link is provided which enables the user to login and view pages that look very similar to the desktop application. All the functionality of the desktop system is available including integration of published fares from the required GDS and no-frills fares.

With this option the main advantages are that there is no specialized software to be loaded at each location, therefore removing the need for a technician to visit the site. The fares database is held on a secure server on the Internet. All that is needed is an Internet connection and a web browser.

Any support issues and updates are kept simple with this option as we can track any support problems and do program changes on a central basis.

Fares Assist - Websites B2B & B2C

To drive a more traditional web site we have developed a standard datastream component (in the form of an MS COM component) to interrogate the Fares Assist database. This is described in more detail below.

Web fare search functionality can be provided that is designed to meet your exact requirements. This is often used for corporate customers who are able to login and view their own fares or standard fares which have a customer specific transaction fee applied.

We can undertake as much or as little of this part of your fares process as you would prefer, we are able to design a fully functioning website, work with your preferred partners to provide the technical integration of the fare system into their design or train your preferred partners on the use of the COM object in order that they can retrieve information from the system.

Click here to download a detailed fact sheet in PDF format