Walk a mile in a customer's shoes they said

 And so I did... because I AM the customer. 

Background:

I flew SEA-BA- LHR-AY-HEL-AY-RIX in J class (except the final leg which was on an all Y ATR-72.

The flights were all listed as British Airways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways (a subsidiary of IAG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Airlines_Group  but flown by BA, AY (Finnair - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnair)  and NORRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Regional_Airlines respectively.  I kept my bag with me at all times. (BA in Seattle wanted to take the bag from me). BA's local ground handling agent was WFS. https://www.wfs.aero/ - itself a subsidiary of Singapore SATS. https://www.sats.com.sg/ (Are you following so far?) were acting like bag Nazis.

On the last leg In Helsinki - I chose to check the bag

as it was an ATR72 aircraft and it would not have fitted in the overhead bin.

Yes I received a bag tag and it would have made it. I watched with anxiety as they did not load the aircraft which was in full display before I boarded. 

To my surprise. I received a message as I landed in RIX.

But on the off chance they were wrong. Sure enough my bag appeared correctly. Happily I ignored the message. But sure enough Finnair is relentless.(Actually this is good but let's continue with the saga).

I received another message from Finnair. But this time labelled as an airline called "XS". 

So I thought I would check to see who is airline "XS".

 

Those of us who have been around for a long time know who SITA is. https://www.sita.aero/ 

So dutifully i want to respond back to Finnair and tell them I did indeed receive the bag. But Finnair doesn't want to hear what I have to say... they want to follow procedure.

As you can expect it would not let me continue. But here is the sequence of screens that I went through.

 

 

 

At this point - one realizes, the whole exercise is down the wrong path.

So what are the learnings on this? BETTER TESTING. WALK that mile. And next time when you send a useless mail to a customer make sure that it does what you intend it to do. 

Thanks! 

Postscript... here is the follow up mail.

 

 

 

CORRECTION: Aegean Website Upgrade

Dear fellow professors

I stand before you admonished in not accurately checking my facts. Mea culpa. The information I gave you on the Aegean Airlines (A3) website is incorrect.

Right airline - wrong vendor.

Aegean has migrated AWAY from the SITA IBE to the Amadeus IBE. So the problem is with the cutover to Amadeus's IBE.

Thanks to Professor Tony for setting me straight. And yes its still giving me bad results that raised the price by 48 Euros per segment!!!!

Cheers

SITA's New IBE costs More Money

I happened to be working on a project looking at IBEs. Over the weekend SITA's new IBE went live (after being down for more than 36 hours). On its return the availability of fares dropped a whole class. It went from 4 to 3. As a result there are now a lot of people who thought they could buy tickets at the lower fare which has now disappeared.

It is clear there are going to be a few teething problems with the implementation of the new IBE. However its all under SITA's control - they have the pricing, the IBE and the back end Res System

So let's hope it settles down.

I will be watching!!!

Cheers

No Secret Any More - AC Cans Polaris PSS

The slow painful lack of progress with the Air Canada Reservations Project known as Polaris has come to a dead stop with AC writing off C$67 million. More importantly the depth of the work left to do was an astonishing C$40 million. This clearly indicates that the project was no where near done. Even if you discount a large amount of money for implementation, there is a clear indication that this project had some significant hills to climb to reach an "implementable" solution. Sadly ITA software is left without its anchor customer for what is a significant amount of their future revenue expectation.

And the big winner in all this?

Amadeus?

Once again carrying all before it - Amadeus is fast becoming the only game in town for large scale reservations systems PSS. ....Well maybe not.... Amadeus has many problems of its own with the UAL implementation not making any visible progress. There are now some pretty good alternatives for large scale legacy airlines.

Mature solutions are from: Mercator (the core system of Emirates and several other airlines), itself an adaptation of the old Swissair Atrraxis system.
SabreSonic (as deployed at AA and many other carriers) the latest iteration of the venerable system from Sabre.
Horizon (although I am sure that I will get flamed by SITA who think its a brand new system)
EDS-Shares - Continental, Virgin Atlantic and US Airways are the biggest users.

There are some good solutions at the lower level of LCC and simple carrier level - such as Navitaire New Skies and Results or TikSystems (Amadeus's newest best friend).

Still trying to make headway are Unisys's Air Core, and IBS's solution.

The market for PSSs remains in churn with some big contracts still up for grabs. Lufthansa's exit from the market has left a hole. The cooperation between UA and CO should be interesting and we will be keeping an eye on this. They might yet decide to go to something different away from Altea. For sure there are a lot of people making trips to Chicago and Houston!

Actually there is one certified winner in this. IBM who managed to stay behind the scenes and retain the value of their relationship with AC. Couple this with the recent outsourcing of many of QF's IT functions to the Software and Services Giant and the boys in Armonk must be smiling.

For the rest - stay tuned.

MAS goes with SITA

Bucking the trend of Amadeus winning everything, Malaysian Airlines System has gone with SITA’s revamped Horizon product for PSS, DCS etc. Saudi Arabian Airlines however stayed with the mob and went to Altea. In both cases they previously had their own res system. MAS is currently a user of the old Atraxis system aka Swissair’s TPF or ALCS. This week saw the end of Iris – Varig’s old Atraxis host. This leaves very few customers – TAP and Brussels along with Swiss and Emirates.

Cheers.

Bravo Sita - Sure IT can help save money but why stop there?

Research by SITA and trumpeted by their top brass at the recent SITA event in BRU (the past week) shows that the airline industry could save a lot of money.

The report distributed this week at SITA’s Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels, includes research from Cambridge University which demonstrates that technology such as location sensing via mobile devices could save airlines up to $600 million by tracking passengers, sending messages and moving them to gates more efficiently; improving turnaround times and reducing delays.

At current growth rates, there will be five billion mobile customers by 2011 and functionality on mobile devices will be increasingly sophisticated. For the air transport industry this opens the door to a new way of doing business as mobile phones are currently used by 90% of airline passengers. Bear in mind that this would mean about north of 80% of all the world's population will have Mobile phones. No other technology in the history of the world has been so universally distributed.

Jim Peters, Chief Technology Officer, SITA said, “These ‘digital travellers’, will have on-demand access to a range of mobile-enabled services such as real time flight updates; self-service booking, check-in and boarding; and mobile payments.”

OK so here is a challenge. Why not be really smart about it and start re-thinking the process of travel and eliminating now obsolete and useless technology components - like for example e-tickets.

Just our small direct research on an 8 million passenger airline showed savings of between $2-20 per ticket. That would return savings far in excess of the numbers mentioned here. This was conservative and didn't include the savings from removing hardware and even organizations like IATA's BSP from the stage.

Will the airlines do it? Nah - not in yours and my life time. Or will they?

Let me know what you think.

Send me a comment or private note!

Cheers

Timothy