We are excited to announce that Pace Revenue has been acquired by FLYR. By joining forces with FLYR, we will become the Revenue Operating System for the $9 Trillion travel industry, helping the industry’s commercial decision-makers achieve their highest potential.

Pace was founded in 2016, the same year DeepMind, Google’s machine learning division, managed to beat Go world champion Lee Sedol. This huge milestone for machine learning became the catalyst behind our decision to start working on Pace.

Our thesis was that human decision-making, in general, was not dissimilar to the games that machine learning was winning. We believed that even the most complex, collaborative, and strategic decisions would eventually be drawn into the world of decision augmentation, automation, and optimization.

We estimated that the travel industry was struggling to respond quickly and accurately to continuously changing demand conditions, resulting in a 10-20% revenue leakage. More incredible than that was the realization that more than 90% of the industry was using manual processes and addressing only a small part of the total opportunity.

We knew the travel industry was sitting on hundreds of billions of trapped potential that could be unleashed by the use of technology, so we decided to build a company to capture the opportunity.

In business, timing is critical, and we believed that an inflection point of technology had been reached. Large quantities of siloed data were rapidly making their way into the cloud and machine learning techniques were making possible what could not even be imagined a few years earlier.

Our goal was to start with revenue management for the hospitality industry and then scale to become the single platform where commercial teams would access to understand their challenges, inform their decisions, and execute targeted strategies toward optimal outcomes.

Today, Pace optimizes pricing for 1,000 hospitality customers in 45 countries, representing $3 billion of annual bookings.

We’ve made huge strides on this journey so far. Today we optimize over 120,000 hotel rooms with over $3 Billion annual turnover. We have demonstrated sustained incremental revenue growth in excess of 10%, and those improvements have been seen by our most sophisticated customers with well-established revenue management teams.

But this is just the beginning.

When we met the FLYR team, we were amazed by the similarity of our stories. While our respective industry focuses were different, our vision and mission of becoming a commercial operating system for our customers were remarkably aligned. Also, our strong mutual beliefs in technology innovation, great people, amazing products, and global growth aspirations made for a fantastic fit.

What started as a partnership conversation quickly turned into an opportunity to build something bigger, together. With full alignment onto a joint mission, we are well equipped to change a decades-old status quo. In a sector dominated by online travel agencies (OTAs) and slow technology incumbents, we believe we have an incredible opportunity ahead of us to build the next generation of decision intelligence for travel and transportation leaders across the globe.

With Pace now part of FLYR we can address the needs of the industry faster and more efficiently and become the platform where commercial teams across all travel and transportation verticals realize their highest potential. We are a partner first, vendor second, and we look forward to shaping the future of travel together.

Jens Munch & Jason Pinto