The airline platform, reborn from the ashes.
Phoenix Core is our concept for retiring decades-old PSS mainframes with an AI-native offer-and-order core — designed for the way modern airlines sell, fly, and serve. It’s in design today; what follows is the vision, not a shipping product.
Built on systems older than the jet bridge.
The Passenger Service System is the beating heart of an airline — and for most of the industry it is the oldest software still in production. Phoenix begins where that era ends.
Green-screen mainframes
Most carriers still run reservations on host systems and teletype-era messaging designed in the 1960s. The terminal changed; the core never did.
Batch, never real-time
Fares filed in cycles, availability recomputed overnight, ancillaries bolted on. The airline reacts to the market a day late — it can never anticipate.
Locked in, fenced off
Monolithic vendors, closed schemas, and an integration tax on every new idea. Shipping a simple new bundle takes a quarter and a change request.
Everything a PSS was — rebuilt as one composable core.
Six capabilities, one data model, zero seams. Adopt a single module beside your incumbent, or run the whole airline on Phoenix. Each speaks open APIs from day one.
Offer
A real-time pricing and merchandising engine. Every search returns a dynamic, bundled, individualized offer — fares, ancillaries, and partners in one shop response.
Order
One order record from shop to flown. Native NDC and ONE Order replace the PNR, ticket, and EMD sprawl with a single, mutable source of truth.
Retailing
Sell anything, anywhere — seats, bags, lounges, upgrades, third-party products — across web, app, agent, and airport with consistent inventory.
Operations
Inventory, schedules, disruption, and re-accommodation on a live, event-driven model that reflects the operation as it actually unfolds.
Loyalty
Earn and burn in any currency, in the moment of sale. Recognition and value travel with the order rather than living in a separate silo.
Settlement
Accounting, interlining, and reconciliation derived automatically from orders — accurate to the cent, available the instant a transaction clears.
AI woven through the core — not bolted on the side.
Legacy PSSs were built for clerks at terminals. Phoenix is built for models in the loop: every offer, order, and operational decision is a place where intelligence acts.
An illustration of how the concept would behave — not live data.
Agentic disruption recovery
When weather cascades, Phoenix re-accommodates thousands of passengers in seconds — balancing cost, connections, crew legality, and customer value.
Continuous dynamic offers
Every search is priced and bundled in real time against live demand, willingness-to-pay, and remaining inventory. No fare classes. No overnight batch.
Conversational servicing
Passengers change, refund, and upgrade in natural language. The model handles the routine and escalates the genuine edge case to a human with full context.
Revenue & anomaly intelligence
Models surface leakage, fraud, and missed upsell the moment they appear — turning the order stream into a continuous source of margin.
Cloud-native to the core. Open at every edge.
Phoenix is event-driven, API-first, and deployed continuously. The hard part of leaving a legacy PSS was always the migration — so we engineered the platform around doing it without a big bang.
Composable services
Independently deployable domains over a shared event log. Replace a module without re-platforming the airline.
Open by default
Documented REST and event APIs, native NDC & ONE Order. No closed schemas, no integration tax.
Global, elastic scale
Multi-region and event-driven — it absorbs an IROP surge and a fare sale without breaking a sweat.
Secure & compliant
PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and data residency built in. Every order is auditable end to end.
Connect
Phoenix sits beside your PSS and syncs orders bi-directionally. Nothing is ripped out.
Run alongside
Shift one flow at a time — start retailing on Phoenix while the host still flies.
Cut over
When the new core proves itself, retire the mainframe on your schedule.
Let’s build it.
Phoenix Core is a concept we’re actively designing — not a shipping product yet. If retiring the mainframe is on your roadmap, tell us about your airline and we’ll compare notes and pressure-test the vision together.