Understanding Fare Families in the Airline Industry

Introduction

In the realm of air travel, the concept of fare families mirrors the dynamics of a family unit. Just as family members share commonalities despite their individual characteristics, fare families encompass flights with similar attributes, such as flight details and duration, yet offer varying services and amenities based on price

Consider the example of selecting an Emirates Flight. Despite sharing identical flight details like flight number, departure and arrival times, and aircraft number, different fare families within the economy class, such as Eco Special, Eco Saver, and Eco Flex, offer distinct services and pricing structures.

I hope till now you understand what a fare family is.
Let’s discuss why we need it.

Significance of Fare Families

The necessity for fare families stems from the desire to provide travelers with a range of service options tailored to their preferences and needs. By bundling different services into fare families, airlines offer travelers the flexibility to choose the package that aligns best with their requirements.

Benefits:

Allows travelers to select services according to their preferences.
Provides clarity and transparency in pricing and services offered.
Enhances the overall travel experience by catering to diverse passenger needs.

Let’s discuss How to implement fare families.

Implementation of Fare Families

Implementing fare families varies depending on the airline provider’s system.

Navitaire Provider:

Fare families are inherent in the flight search response.
Fare families are identified based on different product classes, each associated with specific fare families.

In above screenshot you can see ProductClass is R, it means saver fare family
Don’t worry you will get all these data from either airline or provider, they will provide all the documents about fare families So till now we discussed about Navitaire provider where we don’t need to do anything to get fare families in flight search response.

Amadeus Provider:

Fare families, known as “Upsells,” require enabling by the Amadeus support team to your office ID
Extra nodes in the flight search request, such as feeIdDescription, are necessary to retrieve fare families in the response.

So in amadeus provider fare families also known as “Upsells”, as you can see in above screenshot we have to send feeIdDescription node with above details in Fare_MasterPricerTravelBoardSearch API (Flight search api) to get fare families in response.

I hope now you can implement fare families in Amadeus as well.

Accelero and Redix Providers:

Fare families are included in the flight search response without the need for additional configuration.

Conclusion:

Understanding fare families is integral to navigating the complexities of air travel and optimizing the travel experience. By leveraging fare families, airlines can offer passengers a diverse array of services and amenities tailored to their preferences, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Flowchart:

How fare families are selected in different airlines as per different providers.