Flight Seat Inventory Control Considering Airline Ancillary Services

As competition in the air transport market continues to intensify and consumer demand for personalization continues to grow,airlines are confronted with fierce competition and pressure to meet the personalized needs of passengers,providing ancillary services has become an important way for airlines to gain superiority in the competition and to meet personalized needs of passengers,it is also an important measure for airlines to increase revenue.Ancillary services are airlines' important sources of revenue.Traditional domestic research on seat inventory control did not consider the impact of ancillary services on seat inventory control.Therefore,this paper studies seat inventory control considering ancillary services.This paper first studies the pricing of airline ancillary services.Based on the characteristics of airline ancillary services on the different development stages,this paper proposes effective pricing strategy of ancillary service at each stage.Then,for the semi-restricted fare structure and the menu-based fare structure derived from ancillary services,multinomial logit models and nested logit models are used to study the passengers' choice behavior of airline fare products and ancillary services.The models show the impact of airlines' different fare structures on passengers' choice behavior,thus explaining the changes in passenger demand of different fare structures.Finally,a seat inventory control model is used to solve the seat inventory control problem under the menu-based fare structure.The numerical example is used to verify the difference of revenue between the semi-restricted fare structure and the menu-based fare structure and explain the impact of ancillary services on airline revenue.