Information is power and at ForwardKeys® we are committed to providing decision-makers with unique tactical information on travel trends.
Here we answer some common questions from ForwardKeys users. For more support, please feel free to contact the Customer Support team by submitting a ticket at: https://support.forwardkeys.com, we will get back to you as soon as possible.
1. How many months in the future can we forward look?
Air reservations are technically open up to one year in the future.
Depending on the booking traditions of destinations and source markets, we recommend you to forward look at most six months into the future.
Many origin markets in Asia and the Middle East are known to prefer late bookings (average lead times are around two months) while Western origin markets and island destinations prefer early bookings (four to six months prior to travel).
2. Why are “Total Trips” and “Arrivals in Further Destinations” different in Departures module?
3. What do the numbers represent in your application? What is “Overnights”?
4. Does ForwardKeys know the nationality of travellers?
ForwardKeys only knows the starting location of travellers’ itineraries, which is called “Trip Origin”. Nationality is personal information which is stored separately by travel agencies and airlines for privacy reasons.
5. What is the difference between Booking History and Travel History?
Booking History displays data according to the dates when the trips were booked.
Travel History displays data according to the dates when the trips happened:
- Arrivals and Continuing Departures module: when travellers arrived in the destination.
- Departures module: when travellers departed from their origin.
- Overnights module: when travellers made overnight stays in the destination.
6. If I want to analyse booking seasonality, should I use Booking History?
It is recommended to use Booking History if you don’t need to focus on analysing a specific travel period.
If you do want to analyse booking patterns for arrivals during a specific period, for example, analysing the booking pattern for travel during the Easter holidays, it is recommended to use Booking Pace or Pickup to analyse the booking pattern.
7. Can I compare the values of arrivals or departures in Actual Air Reservations with the value of total scheduled flight seats in Seat Capacity?
They are not comparable, unless you set up correct parameters for queries in Actual Air Reservations dataset. Here is why:
Values of arrivals and departures in Actual Air Reservations dataset usually include travellers taking either direct or transit flights, whilst scheduled flights in Seat Capacity only take direct flights into account.
8. How does ForwardKeys define business, leisure, group, and VFR travellers?
ForwardKeys defines pax profiles according to air reservation details, including distribution channel, pax per booking, travel dates, length of stay, etc. More details can be found in the glossary.
9. Why are there negative values for lead time categories?
A trip can be booked, cancelled, and re-booked until a traveller completes it. Lead times have to count every booking and cancelling actions. Negative values come from cancellation actions. Here is an example of how negative lead times can appear:
10. Why are there different figures for historical arrivals? What is Comparable Set? What is Normalisation?
Sometimes users run a query comparing 2017 vs. 2016, and then another query 2016 vs. 2015, and they find that the volume of 2016 is different in the two queries. This is because ForwardKeys has used different “Comparable Sets” for the two queries.
Switching to “Advanced” and “Standard” parameter panel view, you may see the label of “Comparable Set”.
ForwardKeys detects perimeter changes for every single query and by default “normalisation” is performed to exclude perimeter changes from the query, and the query results that are then displayed are called a “comparable set”.
For more details, please contact your support analyst, he/she will give you a more detailed answer.
11. What is “POI as a block”? Why do the arrivals in all the British cities NOT add up to the total arrivals in the UK? (for DMO customers)
ForwardKeys ultimately process each airport terminal in travellers’ itinerary as independent locations, for counting passengers, qualifying their Length of Stay at each location as well as the Pax Profile.
Under this setting, if a traveller visited New York City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles during his/her trip to the U.S.A., this is counted as three arrivals in the U.S.A., which is different from the immigration counting – this traveller entered the U.S.A. only once, thus counted as one arrival.
When applying the “POI as block” configuration, ForwardKeys considers a country as a unique location. In the above example, the traveller will be counted as one arrival in the U.S.A., his/her Length of Stay at the U.S.A. is the total nights he/she spent in New Year City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. However when the user query arrivals into each of the cities, the traveller is counted as one arrival for each city, therefore, arrivals into cities do not add to the arrivals in the country.
12. Is it possible to define that all queries exclude domestic arrivals by default?
Yes. Preferred options (such as excluding domestic arrivals) can be defined in the Profile menu, Definitions and Preferences submenu.
13. How is a weekend defined?
Weekends are defined by default as Friday and Saturday nights. Users can customise their own definition of weekend nights in the Profile menu, Definitions and Preferences submenu.
14. What does the “x-axis” mean in the booking pace analysis?
Booking pace analysis is displayed only after selecting an arrival period. The x-axis refers to the days, weeks or months (depending on the scale defined for the initial query) still left until the start of the selected travel period.
15. How is pax profile defined?
Business (travellers):
- Bookings are made by a Corporate Travel Agency.
- Bookings are flagged as being made via a corporate implant of any agency (not necessarily a Corporate Travel Agency).
- Type of stay at Point of Interest (POI) is “workweek” and length of stay is up to 2 nights. Note that, because this rule is linked to the POI being analysed, a passenger can be classified as a Business traveller for a destination and as a Leisure traveller for another destination within the same trip.
- Pax per booking is 1, and
- Type of stay if workweek for short-haul trips. (short-haul trip=less than 4000 km)
- Length of stay at POI is up to 12 nights for long-haul trips. (long-haul trip=more than 4000 km)
Group (travellers): for bookings where the number of pax per booking is higher than 6.
VFR + Expats: for bookings with Length of stay at POI being 22 or more nights. VFR stands for Visiting Friends & Relatives. Note that, because this rule is linked to the POI being analysed, a passenger can be classified as VFR + Expat for a destination and as a Leisure traveller for another destination within the same trip.
Leisure (travellers): all bookings that do not fall into the above categories.
