Airlines Reporting Corporation: Leveraging IoT for Improved Data Accessibility and Product Development

Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a key intermediary in the travel industry, had accumulated a massive amount of data over its 50 years of operation. This data was stored in on-premises servers and was largely siloed by the company’s seven business domains. The company wanted to bring new products to market faster by making data more accessible across the business. However, ARC's existing product development processes relied heavily on the tribal knowledge of domain experts, which created bottlenecks and risked loss of expertise when employees left the company. In 2018, ARC decided to embark on a digital transformation initiative, which included modernizing business processes and migrating all their data to an AWS S3 Data Lake and Snowflake Data Cloud. The goal was to make data more accessible across domains and reduce reliance on individual expertise during product development. To ensure that employees could find the data they needed, ARC sought to implement a data catalog solution for their migrated cloud data.

Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) is a small but significant player in the travel industry, acting as an intermediary between airlines and travel companies such as Expedia. They handle transactions including refunds, exchanges, and cancellations. In recent years, they have strategically positioned themselves as a data and analytics company, selling business intelligence and other data products to airlines, travel management companies, and other third-parties. ARC develops their data products using aggregated data from their settlement transactions and from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). In 2019, ARC managed more than $97.4 billion in transactions between airlines and travel agencies, representing more than 302 million passenger trips. Their membership includes more than 200 airlines and 9,400 travel agencies, and they have 13,000 points of sale.