Log-in here if you’re already a subscriber
The potential for optimization in a network airline schedule is practically infinite. The time available to network planning and scheduling analysts is not. This fundamental discrepancy is what Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs aim to address through Odysee, a startup revealed last week at the 2024 UP.Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas and officially launched on Oct. 8 at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam.
Alaska and UP.Labs, an extension of the venture capital firm UP.Partners, announced their collaboration on an “airline venture lab” at last year’s UP.Summit in Dallas. As previously reported by The Air Current, the partners aim to launch a total of six startups in the space of three years, all aimed at solving strategic challenges for Alaska while simultaneously developing products that can be profitably sold to the broader industry.
Related: Alaska Airlines embarks on an experiment in near-term innovation
Odysee is the first of these startups, backed by $5 million in seed funding led by UP.Partners. Its core product is an airline schedule simulation and optimization tool with revenue prediction, allowing analysts to quantify the impacts of proposed schedule changes and stress test the new schedule through simulation analysis. Powered by artificial intelligence, the tool enables them to assess more options and evaluate more variables than they could manually, increasing the efficiency and confidence of their trade-off analyses.
“What this really enables us to do is to go a level down and with the click of a button solve a question: ‘Which flight is better at this time?’” said Kirsten Amrine, Alaska’s VP of revenue management and network planning, in an interview with TAC. “It may have previously taken us half an hour to sort that out; now we can run a scenario and within a minute we have a solution back. And so it makes a lot of these trade-off decisions more worthwhile to dig into, whereas before it just wasn’t worth it.”
Subscribe to continue reading...Subscribe to Continue Reading
Our award-winning aerospace reporting combines the highest standards of journalism with the level of technical detail and rigor expected by a sophisticated industry audience.
- Exclusive reporting and analysis on the strategy and technology of flying
- Full access to our archive of industry intelligence
- We respect your time; everything we publish earns your attention
