Technova Software✈️ Air cargo · Revenue management
RTS: deciding fast and pricing right in air cargo
In air cargo, moving fast is worth nothing if the decision is wrong; and waiting for the perfect answer costs almost as much. Revenue Technology Services has been selling software to resolve that tension since 1982. This advertorial reviews what the company sells today, what the 2026 market numbers say, and what all of it means in a country where 74.2% of the cargo goes through a single airport.
01 · The problem
⏱️ The decision that cannot be slow or rushed
A recent RTS post on LinkedIn puts it in one line: in air cargo, the real advantage lies in balancing speed with precision, making decisions that are both timely and informed. It is not an isolated piece of marketing; it is the diagnosis the company repeats in its technical blog.
In an article written by its own team, RTS describes the underlying problem: in air cargo, “pricing” gets confused with “rating”. That is, price is taken to mean applying a rate that already exists in the system, rather than deciding what that rate should be. The text is explicit: most airlines rely on the experience of their sales teams plus third-party data to come up with the number.
That distinction separates two operating worlds. In the first, price is negotiated case by case and the memory of the business lives in spreadsheets and in three people's heads. In the second, price is recommended by a model, documented, and auditable. The difference is not cosmetic: when margin compresses, the only lever left is the mix of volume, rate and cost.
02 · The company
🏢 Who RTS is and what it actually sells
Revenue Technology Services began as a division of Control Data Corporation and built a yield management system for Republic Airlines on a mainframe in 1982. It was spun off as an independent company in 1991 through a purchase by YMS, Inc. Today it is based in the Dallas, Texas area, with offices in Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, the Netherlands and several cities in India.
| Product | What it does | Decision it supports |
|---|---|---|
| Velocity | Cargo revenue management platform with machine learning: demand forecasting, overbooking and origin-destination optimisation | How much capacity to commit, and to which customer profile |
| AcceleRate | Dynamic pricing engine: recommends general tariff, contract and spot rates using competition, customer value, price elasticity and costs | At what price to answer a request or renew a contract |
| Foresight | Revenue planning and sales budgeting by flight, origin-destination and market | What target to set for the commercial team, and how to track it |
| Compass | Schedule optimiser: generates clean-sheet schedules that maximise network revenue while respecting curfews, slots and range | How to allocate fleet and capacity across routes |
Descriptions taken from RTS product pages. The company also sells solutions for passenger airlines, cruise and ferry, logistics, rail and hospitality, plus BPM, IT and analytics services.
Who it works with
The customer list RTS makes public — on its site and in its press releases — includes Delta Cargo, United, Southwest Cargo, IAG Cargo, Saudia Cargo, Air Canada Cargo, Emirates Cargo, Turkish Cargo, Ethiopian, Virgin Atlantic Cargo, American Airlines Cargo, LOT Cargo, Air India, Aeroméxico Cargo and Oman Air Cargo, among others. The most documented recent moves are three: Air India, which in September 2025 selected Velocity and AcceleRate for its cargo revenue transformation; LOT Cargo, which the same month added Velocity, AcceleRate and Foresight; and Aeroméxico Cargo, which in March 2025 completed a readiness assessment with RTS before implementing automated revenue management.
A useful detail for anyone arriving from the LinkedIn post: CargoQuotient is not a module. It is the hashtag RTS uses to group its cargo-intelligence message on social media (#CargoQuotient), and it appears alongside Velocity and AcceleRate. Anyone looking for a product by that name in the catalogue will not find one.
03 · The market
📊 2026: revenue from price, not from volume
IATA projects 71.7 million tonnes moved in 2026, just 0.2% more than 2025, after cutting its March forecast. Even so, cargo revenue would reach USD 162 billion, 7.2% above the USD 151 billion of 2025, and yields would rise 6.5% after three consecutive years of decline.
Source: IATA financial outlook, June 2026, as reported by Air Cargo News. Revenue growth comes from cost recovery, not from more tonnes.
The backdrop is uncomfortable: jet fuel prices jumped, and IATA estimates fuel costs rising from USD 252 billion in 2025 to USD 350 billion in 2026, nearly 40% more. As a result, industry net profit would fall from USD 45 billion to USD 23 billion. The body itself warns that the immediate recovery will come “more by pricing than by a rapid return of volumes”.
August 2026 data confirms the trend: demand grew 4.4% in cargo tonne-kilometres while capacity fell 0.1%, the cargo load factor reached 46.0%, and yields rose month on month for the first time since April. Latin America and the Caribbean grew 5.1%, above the global average, although IATA warns that export-oriented markets in the region may soften.
Year-on-year demand change (CTK) in August 2026. Source: IATA press release, 29 September 2026.
04 · Colombia
🇨🇴 A concentrated, perishable, seasonal market
In 2025 Colombia moved 1.09 million tonnes of air cargo, 2.7% more than in 2024. But the growth did not come from exports: they fell 1.9% to 507,800 tonnes, while imports rose 7.9% to 310,500 tonnes.
Source: Analdex using Aerocivil data, January-December 2025 report (March 2026).
The structure is even more revealing. El Dorado moved 810,800 tonnes, 74.2% of the national total, and 681,800 international tonnes, 85.3%. José María Córdova, in Rionegro, adds 132,200 tonnes and 12.1%. Cali, Barranquilla and San Andrés each stay below 3%. By airline, Avianca Cargo leads with 260,900 tonnes, followed by Línea Aérea Carguera de Colombia, Atlas Air and Aero Sucre Cargo.
Share of the 1.09 million tonnes moved in 2025. Source: Analdex / Aerocivil.
And one product dominates: of air exports classified by product (396,200 tonnes), fresh flowers accounted for 314,300 tonnes. The United States took 349,800 tonnes, 68.9% of the exported total. Translated into operations: one corridor, one perishable product and sharp seasonal peaks —with Valentine's Day the most visible— that define a good part of the year.
05 · The mechanics
🧮 How a price that can be defended is built
AcceleRate's proposal can be broken into four inputs. None of them is new in revenue management theory; what is new is having them in the same model, at the same speed as the customer's request.
🏁 Competition
What the market is charging on the same corridor and with what available capacity. Without this, the rate is an opinion.
👤 Customer value
What a forwarder or agent actually contributes: volume, consistency, product mix and margin — not tonnes alone.
📉 Elasticity
The probability that the customer accepts the proposed price. This input is what prevents winning the rate and losing the shipment.
💵 Costs
Cost per position, handling and fuel. It sets the floor below which no recommendation makes sense.
The next step is less glamorous and more decisive: turning that recommendation into a publishable rate. In practice that means averaging across weight breaks and container or pallet types, and producing a rate sheet the sales team can negotiate without reinterpreting the model. AcceleRate includes that output and the electronic distribution of rate sheets.
06 · Measurement
🎯 Seven numbers that separate the promise from the result
None of these metrics is exotic. What changes is the discipline of looking at them together, and before the month closes rather than after.
| Metric | What it reveals | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 📈 Yield (revenue per tonne-km) | Whether the rate is capturing the corridor's value | Volume rises and yield falls two months in a row |
| 📦 Load factor | Actual use of offered capacity | High load factor with low yield: scarce capacity sold cheap |
| 💰 RATK | Revenue per available tonne-kilometre, comparable across routes | Widening gap versus similar corridors |
| ✅ Recommended-rate acceptance | Whether the model is calibrated or lives in the air | Fewer than 40% of recommendations are used |
| ⏱️ Quote response time | Real commercial competitiveness | More than a day for a perishable spot |
| 🔄 Quote-to-book | Conversion from quote to booking | Falls when price rises: badly estimated elasticity |
| 🧾 Published vs. closed rate deviation | Commercial execution discipline | Systematic discounts outside policy |
Indicators suggested by Technova, based on the metrics RTS exposes in its products (revenue, tonnage and yield per customer and per airline). They are not targets published by the company.
07 · The risks
⚠️ Six ways to buy revenue management and gain nothing
| Risk | How it shows up | How to mitigate it |
|---|---|---|
| 🧹 Dirty data | Miscoded air waybills, stale capacity, orphan rates | Audit AWB, CASS and flight schedules before switching the engine on |
| 🕶️ Black box | Nobody can explain the recommendation and sales ignores it | Demand explainability and a shadow run before production |
| 🎯 Misaligned incentives | The team is paid on tonnes while the system optimises margin | Review the sales scheme together with the model, not afterwards |
| 🤝 Compliance | Price conversations between operators that look like coordination | Documented decisions per operator; the system does not share competitor prices across airlines |
| 🔌 Partial integration | Price lives in one system and the booking in another | Test the quote-booking-AWB-invoicing flow end to end |
| 🏝️ Third-party adoption | GSAs and agents keep quoting outside the system | Bring them into the pilot and into the rate sheet from day one |
The first of those risks has documentary backing from RTS itself: in one of its published cases, the starting problem was that the airline could not find “a clear explanation” of the prices its previous solution recommended. The answer was a shadow run to build confidence before going live. That is an implementation detail worth more than any percentage promise.
08 · The path
🗺️ 365 days in three stages
An implementation of this kind is not measured by the contract signature but by what happens at the pricing table twelve months later. This is a reasonable sequence, built on what RTS describes about its deployments and on what usually fails in commercial data projects.
| Stage | Focus | Verifiable deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| 0-90 days | Data diagnosis and baseline | Historical yield, load factor, RATK and acceptance per corridor; two corridors selected for the pilot |
| 90-180 days | Shadow run | Recommendations in parallel with real operations, with measured deviation and an explanation for each case |
| 180-365 days | Production with governance | Prices in use, targets by origin-destination, exception policy and quarterly review with the commercial committee |
That last point almost never appears in the commercial proposal: who can approve an exception, on what criteria and with what record. Without governance, the model becomes one more suggestion that gets ignored when the customer pushes back.
09 · Closing
🚀 The advantage is not speed, it is traceability
The line RTS uses on LinkedIn —moving fast means nothing if the decision is wrong, but waiting too long costs just as much— describes the market moment well. With nearly flat volume, revenue held up by price and fuel eating the margin, the difference between two similar operators lies in how they decide when to accept, when to reject and at what rate.
For an operation like Colombia's —74.2% of cargo through one airport, a dominant perishable product and sharp seasonal peaks— the cost of deciding late is concrete: positions that fly empty, or rates sold below the corridor's value. Software does not fix that on its own; it makes it verifiable.
10 · Sources
📚 Where the numbers come from
- Revenue Technology Services. About us and Our customers, accessed October 2026.
- RTS. AcceleRate for Air Cargo, Foresight for Air Cargo and Compass for Air Cargo: capabilities as declared by the vendor.
- RTS. The Mystic of Pricing in the Air Cargo Industry, technical blog on the difference between pricing and rating.
- RTS. Data-Driven and Evidence-Based Pricing Recommendations, published case on shadow runs and explainability.
- Business Wire. Air India selects RTS, 15 September 2025; LOT Cargo selects RTS, 4 September 2025; Aeroméxico Cargo readiness assessment, 4 March 2025.
- Wikipedia. Revenue Technology Services: origin at Control Data Corporation (1982) and 1991 spin-off.
- IATA financial outlook, June 2026, reported by Air Cargo News: 71.7 million tonnes, USD 162 billion in revenue, yields +6.5%, fuel and profit.
- IATA, press release of 29 September 2026: August demand +4.4%, capacity −0.1%, load factor 46.0%, Latin America +5.1%.
- Analdex. Air traffic report for Colombia, January-December 2025, using Aerocivil data: 1.09 million tonnes, El Dorado 74.2%, flowers 314,300 tonnes.
- Portafolio. Colombian air cargo grew 2.7% in 2025, 18 March 2026.
Disclosure: this advertorial does not include an interview with Revenue Technology Services. Product capabilities are as published by the company and were not verified in operation; market figures come from the independent sources cited. Technova Software does not report RTS customer results here because the company does not publish audited impact figures.
✈️ Can your operation explain its prices?
If you run cargo, exports or a capacity-constrained operation, let's talk about data, pricing and metrics before buying another system.