When you treat seats and ancillaries as stock, retailing decisions become faster and more auditable. Stock in this context is not just seat counts-it is every sellable component with rules about who can consume it. Here is a practical framework for building a stock service that powers both offers and orders.
Catalog your stock objects
Start by defining the atomic units you manage. For flights: cabin, fare brand, RBD, and seat map positions. For ancillaries: bag allowances, lounge passes, paid upgrades, subscription perks. Represent each as a stock keeping unit (SKU) with metadata: validity dates, markets, channel restrictions, and fulfillment instructions.
Inventory model choices
- Deterministic counts: Seats, upgrade certificates, meal counts-hold exact quantities and decrement on commit.
- Entitlement checks: Products such as lounge access might be unlimited but gated by loyalty tier. Encode these as rules rather than numeric stock.
- Derived availability: Combine multiple constraints (aircraft swaps, operational limits) into derived availability that updates via events.
Interfaces that teams need
- Offer service: Queries current stock levels and eligibility to decide what to surface.
- Order manager: Reserves and releases stock atomically during commit and servicing.
- Operations dashboards: Provide human overrides, for example when an aircraft change requires manual seat protection.
- Use optimistic locking with retry budgets for most ancillaries.
- Introduce pessimistic locks only for extremely scarce items (e.g., two cabin upgrades per flight).
- Emit stock change events with correlation IDs so downstream systems reconcile easily.
Analytics and forecasting
Because the stock service sits between offer and order, it is the best place to track conversion funnels. Log every request, hold, release, and expiry. Feed the data into revenue management to refine bid prices and into product teams to evaluate which bundles need rethinking.
Treating seats and ancillaries as managed stock sounds simple, but it shifts the mindset: you stop leaking revenue through manual spreadsheets and start making reliable promises to travelers.