Case Study: Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) achieves $12.5M in operating cost savings and a 78% reduction in ticket fraud with Teradata

ARC: Financial Performance Soars on Dual Active Wings

Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) is a carrier-owned financial clearinghouse that manages ticket sales, settlement and reporting for the air travel industry, serving 147 carriers and more than 21,000 agencies and processing hundreds of millions of transactions annually. Facing costly paper-ticket processes, rising ticket fraud, and an industry-wide need for near-real-time business intelligence, ARC set out in 2000 to modernize its data infrastructure, reduce operating costs, and provide a shared analytics platform for the entire travel industry.

ARC built ARC COMPASS, a multi-terabyte Teradata data warehouse with web-based services (Document Retrieval Service, DataXpert and analytics reports) and in 2005 upgraded to a dual-active Teradata architecture. The solution drove rapid results: 92% e-ticket adoption, a $12.5M reduction in paper-ticket costs, a 78.2% drop in fraud to a level deemed “insignificant,” sub‑3‑second query times, more than 40 new revenue-producing BI products, and roughly $2.24M in operating expense savings over three years while improving performance and disaster recovery.

Airlines Reporting Corporation(ARC)

John Kyle

vice president of marketing and general manager, Data and Analytical Products division