Manager Ancillary, Fare Distribution and Interline at South African Airways (SAA)

Job Purpose    

• The role encompasses three primary functions: Interlines and SPAs, Ancillaries, and Fare Filling and Distribution. Its purpose is to foster, maintain, and enhance relationships with airline partners by establishing interline agreements and developing the ancillary products. Additionally, the role involves overseeing fare filling and distribution to ensure accurate and timely delivery of fare information to the public.
• Key responsibilities include building, managing, and sustaining effective relationships with partner airlines worldwide. It involves creating strategies and defining clear processes for ancillary and fare distribution divisions. The role also includes supporting the Alliances team by negotiating, finalizing, and implementing agreements and practices that enable competitive pricing across relevant markets.
• Ultimately, the goal is to maximize revenue from interline channels and ancillary products. This is achieved through effective ancillary pricing, precise fare distribution, and strong partnerships with interline partners, thereby expanding the airline’s network reach and market presence.

Principal Accountabilities    

• Identify and conclude effective and profitable prorate and interline agreements with airlines to access incremental traffic opportunities
• Implement strategies, plans, actions, methodology and tactics to capture such traffic
• Assist the Alliances team in delivering alliances revenue performance to achieve the Airline’s strategic objectives from partnerships
• Consider the effectiveness of interline and prorate revenue plans and strategies and recommend appropriate corrective actions to optimize the Airline’s revenue generation from Alliances and interline partnerships for presentation to superior and relevant stakeholders
• Manage budget in area of responsibility and contribute to department budget management
• Develop new ancillary products and revenue
• Manage key ancillary revenue partnership accounts
• Monitor every ancillary revenue stream on a monthly basis, and ensure performance exceeds the ancillary budget.
• Present monthly benchmark report on competition ancillary service offers and fee levels
• Develop, maintain value-generating relationships with interline, affiliate and strategic partners for revenue and for accessing incremental revenue sources
• Implement prorate agreements, interline agreements, and competitive fare products, conditions and rules in line with the Airline’s Inventory Optimization strategy
• Identify profitable opportunities for expansion or revenue improvement for the Airline regarding interline pricing and airlines with whom it should develop relationships
• Monitor for variances between the Airline’s competitive positioning and the interline strategies and plans and recommend corrective action as required
• Deliver fares to market in an efficient, accurate and timely manner
• Analyse existing agreements and identify revenue improvement opportunities

Qualifications & Experience    

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Development or related field at NQF level 7 with 5 – 7 years experience in a Ancillary and Interline field OR 7 – 10 years’ experience in Ancillary and interline field of which 5 years at management level
• Applicable IATA qualification will be advantage
• Demonstrated experience in Fare construction principles
• Experience in reading and interpreting airline tickets will be an advantage
• Experience in the ancillary environment

Knowledge and Skills    

• Demonstrate experience and expert knowledge/skills of airline prorate agreements as well as demonstrate efficiency in analytic and problem solving techniques
• Knowledge of the markets within which the airline operates
• Thorough knowledge of Multilateral Prorate Agreement and its effect on airline revenue
• Filing of Chart 2 SPA booking classes in ATPCO and to ensure SPA partners filed their booking classes of the agreed SPA
• Commercial acumen
• Financial acumen
• Negotiation skills
• Project management
• Data analysis

Attributes    

• Leads with purpose
• Manages team performance
• Manages transformation and change initiatives
• Drives innovation
• Sells/translates the vision
• Leverages team diversity
• Role models behaviours and values