Air New Zealand's IT "Melt Down" vs Ryanair's "Planned Outage"

Air New Zealand is one of those airlines that has had its fair share of ups and downs. Nearly brought down by the Ansett Failure and a disastrous set of relationships, the carrier in recent years has operated shall we say a more realistic business model.

On Sunday (October 11th) an airline's worst operations nightmare was realized. Their IT systems crashed - specifically check-in went down. Interestingly it happened on the quietest day of the week in a relatively light weekend. The total number of passengers impacted was estimated at 10,000. The outage did not meet the threshold of compensation as the actual outage was less than the mandatory period. So in reality it was not such a huge deal.

The next day the staff of NZ were treated to a blistering memo from CEO Rob Fife. Here is one link from Computerworld which was probably the most prosaic of all the commentaries.

Now this was interesting in two ways and this is the point of my post here.

The press over Ryanair's planned outage during its cutover from OpenSkies to NewSkies was quite moderate in comparison. And the system was actually down for days not a few hours with operational impact that lasted for several weeks after. Even more recently there have been issues reported at Stansted with check-in systems going down. Remember FR is now 100% web or kiosk check in. Ryanair typically moves more than a million passengers per week.

So the setting of expectations and managing the message becomes quite clear. However perhaps more important it illustrates the love hate relationship that Airlines have with IT.

A final point is a demonstration of why I think Ryanair is actually actually behind the scenes a model for a lot of other airlines. The fact that the airline (FR) can revert to running essentially on paper is nothing short of miraculous. The fact that today they are one of the top 5 airlines for branded passenger operations shows that perhaps there is a lot of stuff that other airlines have that is really useless.

Now that is what I call food for thought.

Cheers