Information is power and at ForwardKeys® we are committed to providing decision makers with unique tactical information on travel trends.

Advanced Experience

This document records some advanced experiences available in ForwardKeys to help maximise user’s productivity:

1. Selecting custom categorisations
2. Scheduling automatic reports
3. Analysing with events and managing Events
4. Accessing Time Series mode

 

1. Selecting categorisations

 

When analysing on Actual Air Reservations dataset, most users usually focus on comparing the performances among different Trip Origins or different Destinations, therefore ForwardKeys sets up the default categorisation by either Trip Origins or Destinations. However, you can change your analysis focus by customizing the categorisation.

Customizing categorisation is available in any module of Actual Air Reservations dataset. It is surely visible in the “Standard” parameter panel view.

In the Analysis set of parameters, select the Categorisation option (1) to expand a drop-down menu with all the available choices. The default categorisation for arrival, overnights, and continuing departures modules is “Trip Origins”. When you select a different categorisation (2), the changes are applied after running a query (3, 4).

For example, if you choose “categorisation by Pax Profiles” for your query, you can compare origin market performances among business, leisure, group, or VFR travellers.

 

2. Scheduling automatic reports

 

You can run the most often used queries and schedule recurrent reports to be delivered to your email inbox on a regular basis. The recurrent reports will update according to your settings for the Travel Dates and Booking Dates, and the rest of the query parameters remain the same for all the recurrent reports.

 

Creating scheduled reports

Run a query with the desired parameter is the first step, then click on the correspondent icon located in the Tool Bar to configure a scheduled report. It will open a pop-up window where you can configure some parameters: Report Name, Email addresses to be sent to and the Frequency (from daily to yearly).

Note that it takes 48 hours for ForwardKeys to process the raw data. If you would like your report to be updated until the latest of end of the week or month or quarterly, we recommend you set Frequency to the 3rd day of the week/month/quarter.

You must also configure how the dates parameters will change upon generating the automatic reports. Click on the date field you want to customise (Travel Dates or Booking Dates). You can define the starting date (From) and the end date (To) for both the current period (Y0) and the comparable period (Y-1) of your interest, such flexibility allows you to receive analysis over a moving period or a period with fixed starting and/or ending dates.

Set up for a recurrent report for showing Next Six Month on the Book

Set up for a recurrent report for showing Year-to-Date performance

Set up for a recurrent report for showing Chinese New Year 2018 on the Book (fixed travel dates for both Y0 and Y-1)

For year-on-year comparison, ticking the “Same dates, previous year” box will automatically set the equivalent dates during the previous year. The comparison period will automatically be set to the equivalent week days when the query runs daily and weekly granularity.

In Travel History and On the Book sections, the Travel Dates (Arrivals, Departures, Overnights dates) must be set up, so that a recurrent report can be generated. Booking Dates can be left unticked, indicating that you would like to receive the recurrent reports with most up-to-date air reservations in your application.

Click “Save” now to schedule your recurrent reports.

 

Preview the scheduled reports

You may not be confident whether you have set up the recurrent reports correctly. “Preview” function can generate the first report to help you test.

Go to Profile menu, Reporting and Peers, My scheduled reports.

Select the report that you want to test, in the Details page, click the “Preview” button. A PDF report will be generated.

In case you’d like to get a PDF report earlier than the normal scheduled date, you can use “Preview” button to get one.

 

Edit and Manage existing scheduled reports

All your scheduled reports are available under Profile menu, Reporting and Peers, My scheduled reports (B). If you have many reports, a couple filters can help you allocate the one you’d like to check (A).

Click on any report to go to its Details page (C). You will have all sent reports in the past listed in this page, you can either view the PDFs, or reproduce the queries and continue analysis work in our application.

You can edit the settings of the recurrent reports (use the Save button to keep the new settings), pause the deliveries of the reports (Stop button), or Preview a report with latest database update (Preview button).

3. Analysing with events and managing events

 

At ForwardKeys, we consider “an event” as anything that can impact on travel or booking behaviour, whether it is a bank holiday in a source market, an air controller strike in the region or an earthquake impacting a subcontinent.

Our database has been prepopulated with school and bank holidays for majority of origin markets worldwide. ForwardKeys analysts manually include events in the database after confirming their impacts on travel and/or booking behaviour. You will also be able to add events that are relevant to your destination (such as conferences, sport events or natural disasters, etc.)

14 categories of events are currently available on ForwardKeys Event Database according to their nature, from both origin market and destination perspectives. Categories of events include:

Note that ForwardKeys Event Database has been gathered from public sources; if you notice any discrepancy between ForwardKeys information and your own sources, please do not hesitate to share the better sources with https://support.forwardkeys.com

Analysing with events

Events for Y0 period are displayed only in the graph view and are located below the chart on the left (A). Events can be filtered by type in the Events filter menu (B) by ticking the boxes of each category.

You can switch to the Capacity changes tab (C) in order to see changes in scheduled air capacity, also a possible reason for sharp variations in travel demand. Use the Capacity changes filter to filter out new or ceased routes. The changes in routes are automatically retrieved from ForwardKeys Capacity database.

Clicking on the Create button (D) will enable an empty pop-up box for you to add relevant events to your destinations.

Recently qualified events (E) will list recent events added during the last 30 days in the application.

Events differences (Y0 vs Y-1) (F) will measure the impact of events during both Y0 and Y-1 period: solid colour of the bar represents a positive impact of the event on Y0 arrivals compared to Y-1 while diagonal lines of the bar means a negative impact. Clicking on the event bar will enable a pop-up box with event details.

 

Creating your events

In a pop up box for the event, the following information is displayed or required to be filled in when creating a new event:

• Name of the event
• Event type: choose from the available categories;
• Location
• Affecting: traveling or booking behaviour;
• Impact on: departures or arrivals;
• Event flag date
• Event impact period
• Impact level
• Linkage to previous events
• Tags: create tags you like
• Visible in graphs or not: in order to make sure a clearer event calendar display, this option is created to hide some events that have long-lasting impact on an extensive period.
• Comments: if creating a new event, you can input comments in this field; If the event is pre-loaded in the database, you will can click “add comments” to enable this field.

 

Managing events

You can manage and export events under “Profile” menu – Context – Events.

You have access to events of ALL locations related to your query or account settings under Calendar view, Parallel Timeline view, or List View (A). The filters and menu tabs (B) can help allocate the events you are interested in. By default, the database is displayed in calendar view and by moving your mouse over the marked dates, the event box(C) will pop-up and the dates will be coloured to show the scope of this event impact. To make comments for the existing events, you will need to click on the event dates and then click on the event in the pop-up box. To create new events, simply click on the “Add” Button (D).

In the title bar of “Events”, the system tells the total number of events found according to the filters in Criteria.

Under the Parallel view, you can better compare the dates of the same events in different years.

Under the List view, events are listed like in a spreadsheet. Click on the events to enable pop-up box to add comments.

Parallel Timeline View of Events

List View of Events

 

4. Accessing Time Series mode

 

Time Series mode helps you to analyse the travel or booking performances during special seasons of the destinations and/or origin markets of your interest over several years. It is available in the “Advanced” parameter panel view in the Travel History and Booking History sections.

When in “Advanced” parameter panel view, move your mouse over the label “Y-o-Y” to unfold the menu where you can select this option. Time Series Date selector will be displayed instead of Travel Dates selectors. The rest of the filters remain as they are as in “Year over Year” mode.

Time Series Date/Event Selector includes: Time Granularity (A), Starting Year (B), Display (C).

“Time Granularity” (A) is used to decide the depth of your analysis. The different options available are: “For each year”, “For each quarter”, “For each month” or “For each week”.

For example, you can compare the first month for each quarter (January, April, July and October) or the second day for each week (Tuesdays).

We can adjust the “Starting Year” (B) of the time series in order to provide a better selection of the period of interest. Please note, due to our agreement with one of the GDSs, our data related to China starts from 2011.

In “Display” filter (C), you can decide to display the lunar events whose periods were pre-defined by ForwardKeys. Lunar events include:

• Easter (Roman and Orthodox): date of Easter -5/+5 days;
• Chinese New Year: date of Lunar New Year Day -5/+10 days;
• Ramadan Low Season (0-23 days after start);
• Ramadan High Season (24-38 days after start).

(The volume of passengers grows fast during the last days of the Ramadan every year in ForwardKeys database.)

Now you are ready for running a time series query for your analysis.