Sunweb
Evolving the travel industry with smart inventory management
Client & Challenge
Sunweb, one of Europe’s leading travel agencies, delivers unforgettable holidays to over 1.5 million passengers annually. A key element of their proposition is the travel package — combining flights and accommodations. Historically, Sunweb secured flight capacity through bulk contracts, ensuring availability but exposing the business to significant inventory risk when demand fell short.
As the travel industry evolved, Sunweb began leveraging external flight capacity — offering real-time tickets directly from airline inventories. This shift reduced inventory risk but introduced new complexity such as volatile pricing and the continuous trade-off between internal and external capacity.
Sunweb approached us with a strategic challenge:
How can we make smarter, more dynamic decisions on when to rely on internal stock and when to switch to external flight capacity — in a way that balances margin, availability, and risk?
While the opportunity was clear, the decision-making process was still driven by historical trends. There was no unified, data-driven framework to assess trade-offs, nor a system to operationalize decisions at scale and with a forecasted outlook. This led to inconsistent practices across destinations and limited Sunweb’s ability to optimize inventory, pricing and profitability.
Our Approach & Solution
We partnered with Sunweb to design a scalable, data-driven system for flight capacity management. This initiative — internally known as the “Smart flight steering” — was built on three key pillars: advanced analytics, user-focused tooling, and cross-functional execution.
Our approach unfolded across four coordinated workstreams:
Strategic Framework Design
We aligned stakeholders across commercial, IT, and analytics teams through targeted interviews and workshops. Together, we developed a shared framework for inventory decisions, anchored in two core metrics:
- Stock-Ratio – A forward-looking metric that compares available internal stock with forecasted demand, powered by a custom passenger forecast model.
- Reward-to-Risk – A decision metric weighing the potential margin gain of switching to external capacity against the risk of unused internal stock.
Data Science & Forecasting
We built a detailed forecasting model to estimate pax volumes on a destination-week level. This model underpins the stock-ratio and provides clarity on expected demand. The reward-to-risk logic incorporates airline prices, historical margins, and conversion probabilities to guide decisions dynamically.
Implementation & Tooling
To ensure adoption, we translated the metrics into an intuitive UX prototype that enables business users to simulate scenarios and assess trade-offs. We collaborated closely with Sunweb’s IT teams to embed the logic into production systems and align it with existing workflows. In the end we developed a new tool to give the controls to steer flights with a lot of control and confidence.
Execution & Leadership
Following the design & strategy phase, we led the execution — coordinating across data science, IT, BI, and commercial teams. We acted as program leads, driving delivery, aligning priorities, and embedding the new approach into business-as-usual operations.
Results And Impact
Although the rollout is still in progress, the Subweb Project is already driving measurable outcomes, with a foundation in place for full-scale adoption in the upcoming travel season.
This project demonstrates the value of integrating strategy, data, and operations. By enabling smarter decisions at the core of Sunweb’s business model, we helped build a sustainable competitive advantage powered by collaboration and data intelligence.
Smarter Inventory Decisions
A structured, data-led framework now supports real-time decisions between internal and external capacity.
Improved Margin Control
The reward-to-risk metric enables earlier, more confident interventions to protect margin.
Operational Alignment
The tooling fosters a shared language across business and IT, accelerating execution.
Scalability
The system is being expanded to all major destinations, ensuring consistent decision quality.
Strategic Advantage
In a competitive market with volatile flight costs, Sunweb is now equipped to lead on both price and reliability.
Contact us to learn how we can help your business harness the power of data and AI to drive innovation and achieve tangible results.
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