ForwardKeys concludes landmark agreement with IATA and ARC to provide data on global air travel

Travel analytics company ForwardKeys hasconcluded a landmark agreement with the International Air Transport Association(IATA) and Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) to include their globalticketing data in its portfolio of products and services.

Through this agreement, ForwardKeys will now provide global air travel datathat includes the world’s most comprehensive air transaction dataset from ARCand IATA. The new relationship will help ForwardKeys expand its currentofferings to customers in the tourism industry.

IATA is the global trade association representing 290 airlines comprising82% of global air traffic. It also operates the Billing and Settlement Plan(BSP), which facilitates and simplifies the selling, reporting and remittingprocedures of IATA-accredited travel agencies in 181 countries and territories,excluding the US.

ARC is an industry leader in air travel distribution and intelligence. Itprovides channel-agnostic tools and insights to enable the diverse omnichannelretailing strategies of its customers. In 2019, ARC settled US$97.4 billion intransactions between airlines and travel agencies, representing more than 302million passenger trips. Its flexible settlement and retailing solutions,innovative technology and comprehensive air transaction data helps the globalair travel community connect, grow and thrive.

ForwardKeys will now receive a regular feed of global ticketing transactiondata settled by IATA and ARC for travel agency bookings – including onlinetravel agencies (OTAs) – as well as direct airline transactions. Customers willbe able to search and query against all the segmentation and profiling criteriathey are familiar with on the ForwardKeys platform.

Additionally, ForwardKeys will now greatly benefit from being able to offerits customers more granular segmentation of the data as well as access to amore comprehensive historical dataset.

Olivier Jager, CEO,ForwardKeys said: “This moment is like the completion of ajigsaw puzzle; we can now see the whole picture in complete detail rather thanjust part of it. Of course, I am excited for us because it strengthens our USP,but I am also excited for our customers because they will receive even morereliable market intelligence which will help them make better decisions.”

“Our mission is to serve our customers with versatile access to the rightpiece of information at the right time to help them understand and predicttravelers’ impact on their business – and this announcement today represents amajor enhancement to that capability,” he added.