How to improve your profit and amount bookings with Thai Airways as Online Travel Agency?

Background

I got a promotion advertisement from Thai Airways in my Facebook flow that said 20% discount on promotion days 27 July - 28 July 2019 eligible for travel between 27 July - 15 September 2019 outbound all Thai Airways European routes. So pretty short notice and timeframe.

This is obviously an opportunity as OTA to increase profit and amount of bookings with Thai Airways. This promotion campaign is not still valid, but similar scenarios will occur in the future. And for sure with other airlines.

How to do? See pictures and text below

https://www.thaiairways.com/en_GB/offer/special_offers/Weekend_Europe.page (old page)

How to take advantage of this opportunity as OTA with Thai Airways?

• Scrape Thai Airways (see Wikipedia link for more info about scraping).
• The OTA pays with a Virtual credit card. And use the promotion code.
• Increase markup - increase sale in the meta channel (as Skyscanner or Kayak). You will anyway as OTA out-compete all your competitors (unless the OTA competitors do the same).
• Promote in newsletter.
• Lower markup on meta.
• Check so there is not a bug in Thai Airways promotion code - the promotion code might be eligible for all routes worldwide.

What's needed as OTA to implement above?

• Scraping capability. Developer staff demanding. Hard to build such teams, but some companies have succeeded. Example Travelfusion and Kiwi that has been around for a while. There are some more. Especially Kiwi is good at mix and match (example Ryanair together with a Legacy carrier or Easyjet together with Wizz Airlines)
• IT-setting/steering/tool system that can tune in - when, airline, dates and where the promotion code is eligible. High-tech and AI-driven tool system that handles different scenarios to increase OTA profit, effectiveness och productivity.
• Capability at short notice implementation of promotion codes. This needs developers to be able to work with short notice and inconvenient working hours. This might be problematic in some countries because of labor law or/and some employees have a family.
• Option to use VC. Might be able to get kick-back.

Further opportunities with other airlines?

• Other airlines might have similar promotion codes.
• Subscribe on all/most airlines newsletters (and on different markets - use Google translate) to find promotion codes. And do as above said.
• Always be meticulous reading airlines newsletter all days a week. Important to find arbitrage opportunities with the purpose to increase revenue and profit.

The downside with above as OTA?

• Many airlines have good protection against scraping (captcha and do the site slower on suspicious IP-numbers). Many airline sites today have it precisely to protect themselves from scraping. This does not mean that scraping is impossible, but clearly much more difficult if the site is well protected. But still, it might be possible. It's a cat-and-mouse game.
• Could have some legal concerns in some countries. But the internet is global.
• You lose the ability to sell your own ancillary products as OTA. Note - important to take into account when scraping to also to scrape airline ancillary products. Might be possible too and make markup.
• More limited possibilities to earn a profit on name-change and change flight date at passenger will. Much easier in a GDS.
• You lose the segment revenue from the GDS(es) and might get less incentive from the airline due to less BSP sale. The worst scenario is that an airline with scraping ban catch an OTA and they remove the ticketing rights in BSP. But smaller airlines often have not a clue about scraping. And some airlines might not care about scraping. Only happy to get the sale.

Conclusion

I think all-together weighted indicates that above is profitable given you have the ability. And what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts. Above is possible to build but complex and might be boring. But it's due to the high boring factor it could be profitable. Most of your competitors are occupied with fun stuff as social media, landing pages, Google adwords, newsletter marketing and offline marketing. As random OTA such marketing is often pretty unprofitable or/and not give so much back - but fun. But it depends a bit how unique your OTA product is, which market and competition etc?

Of course there are a lot of obstacles with scraping (with the intention to make money) that hasn't something to do with the scraping itself.