Data as a Service for OTAs: How Pricing Intelligence Helps Identify Competitor Pricing Gaps

Pricing in the travel industry moves faster than most teams can keep up with.

A difference of even ₹200 on a flight ticket is enough to lose a booking and send a potential customer straight to a competitor.

Pricing is a decision metric for customers, and pricing intelligence is what makes your platform compete with a strategy. If you don’t have a clear view of what your competitors are charging, you are losing potential bookings, burning discount budgets, and creating pricing gaps that directly impact margins.

This is what a major OTA platform was dealing with — limited visibility into competitor pricing across key routes. Continue reading to find out how we helped them identify the gaps using data as a service.

The Challenge: Limited Visibility into Competitor Pricing

This major OTA platform had limited visibility into what their competitor platforms were pricing flights at, in real time.

Their pricing optimization, discount updates were delayed and inconsistent. Sometimes they were underpriced, giving away margins unnecessarily. Other times, they were overpriced due to demand surge or other factors (which hikes prices — research a bit), sending customers to a competitor with a better deal.

However, without consistent pricing analysis, their aim was to stay competitive and to be considered by customers at all times.

The Fix: Proactive Data as a Service Using Pricing Intelligence to Map Exactly Where the Gaps Were

To address this, they partnered with mFilterIt to gain better visibility into what their competitors were doing as part of their pricing strategy.

Using DaaS (Data as a Service) feed, the pricing intelligence tool provided a structure data pipeline built on ecommerce analytics principles that gave the OTA platform a clear, side-by-side view of its own pricing vs a key competitor’s pricing across 100+ mapped flight sectors.

It also enabled an automated price gap detection system for quick discount recalibration. Whenever a pricing difference was mapped between the two platforms, the system flagged it automatically.

Here’s What the Data Actually Showed & Why It Matters for OTAs

Once the data started flowing, the insights were immediate, and the findings were structured across three clear layers of pricing.

Finding 1: Clear MRP gaps, the competitor was already pricing cheaper, even before the discounts were applied

The first data set compared base ticket prices (the price before any coupon or offer is applied) across 8 airlines on both platforms. For several airlines, the competitor’s base price was consistently lower than the OTA’s.

Why does this data & insights matter?

• A higher base price puts you at a disadvantage before discounts are applied or even seen.
• Without competitor mapping, a systematic undercut on key routes can go undetected for months.

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