Case Study: Finnair achieves Asia–Europe route growth and optimized pricing with SAS Demand‑Driven Planning and Optimization

Airline grows its Asia routes with demand optimization solution

Finnair, leveraging Helsinki’s uniquely short Europe–Asia connections, set an ambitious goal to double revenue from long‑haul Asia–Europe flights. Achieving this required precise analytics to untangle a complex network of roughly 1,600 possible end‑to‑end trips, integrate fragmented internal and external data sources, and make margin‑sensitive route, pricing and capacity decisions.

Using SAS for Demand‑Driven Planning and Optimization, Finnair models routes with capacity, frequency and timetables, auto‑forecasts passenger demand and drills down when forecasts diverge from actuals to refine pricing, sales and marketing tactics. The work has driven a shift to data‑driven decision making, enabled reliable market‑share and flow predictions versus competitors, and improved route‑level performance analysis to support the carrier’s growth objectives.

Finnair

Jukka Lahtinen

Manager, Route Planning