When Things Go Wrong

Planning for disruptions” sounds like a contradiction in terms: How can anyone make meaningful plans for unknown events occurring at unspecified times? The rare October snowstorm that dumped up to 30 inches of snow over the northeastern US is a case in point: No one could have foreseen that snow would slow and even shut airports down and create a tarmac-delay situation at a diversion airport before Halloween.

Natural events—snow storms, thunderstorms, even volcanic ash clouds—and man-made disruptions such as labor actions are a fact of life for airlines. “It’s one of the key things keeping them awake at night,” Tony Fernandez, vice president of sales for NCR Travel, said. Freakish weather patterns are combining with limitations on existing staffing and shrinking capacity to compound the problem of getting passengers back into the skies quickly.

The problems may be impossible to prevent, but information technology tools are available that can help ease the pain of recovery.

NCR has had a Flight Reaccommodation tool for several years that “is a pretty mature product,” Fernandez says. It allows airlines to determine the level of automation that will be applied, from a completely automated solution that actively searches for cancellations and missed flights to a solution that must be initiated by an agent.

Flight Reaccommodation can extend the ability to re-accommodate passengers on other airlines, provided that the affected airline’s business rules allow for it.

“Our tool looks upstream,” Fernandez says. “For example, I know there’s a problem in Atlanta. Is there a reroute through Charlotte?”

NCR recently enhanced the tool to improve its speed and is “looking at new opportunities to extend the information to consumers through self-service channels,” he said. The company is expanding the software functionality of its self-service kiosks, located in more than 300 airports worldwide, with fee collection, flight change and premium seating modules to assist with self-re-accommodation. It also is looking to provide linkages to mobile solutions, Fernandez says, and is under contract with one airline to develop and pilot a mobile re-accommodation application by the end of the year.

NCR is taking on another aspect of the cancellation and delay scenario: how to crack the vouchering system, an annoying feature for airlines, hotels and concessionaires.

“We are piloting solutions with two airlines to provide a way for passengers to use our kiosks to get a debit card,” Fernandez said. The bank-supported debit card would eliminate the need to track and reconcile paper vouchers. Airport vendors would treat them as they would any other debit card transaction.

In dealing with flight disruptions, “one size doesn’t fit everything,” Guy Kavanagh, head of portfolio management for airport, payment and ticketing at Amadeus, said. “So we have a suite of tools that airlines can configure.”

Preparing fora Strike

That array of solutions resides within the departure control system of the Altéa Customer Management System, now the largest provider of passenger services IT to the airline industry. If an airline is facing a strike, for example, and will be able to operate only 40% of its planes, various tools go into action depending on how far out a given flight is.

“If you know a week ahead that you are going to be disrupted, you can put the Dynamic Waiver into effect to waive all change fees for a given day,” he said. Dynamic Waiver, part of the Amadeus Ticket Changer set of solutions, allows the passenger to travel on a different day without penalty. It also keeps the revenue in the airline’s house. Ticket re-issues are checked against waiver conditions in real time. If a waiver applies, a reissue is authorized according to the specific waiver conditions.

“Then, a couple of days before the expected strike, you look at load factors,” Kavanagh said. “Passengers have already moved off a number of flights, so you look at which flights to cancel.” The affected passengers are automatically rebooked and re-ticketed to alternative flights.

There will always be last-minute issues at the airport, so the Amadeus Ticket Changer Invol feature enables an airline agent to re-issue a ticket in the case of involuntary re-routing. The fare information from the original ticket is automatically carried forward to the new ticket.

The customer transfer process is fully automated, Kavanagh said. “We have an IATA estimate of 20 minutes per passenger doing this in a traditional system. I’ve gone through this process myself when my incoming flight was six hours late. The airline agent did a complete reroute on Altéa that took 10 minutes—and five of those were her wandering off to find a supervisor.”

It’s possible to move passengers to other carriers, but “the difficulty is knowing how many seats the other airlines have,” Kavanagh said. “We’re not fully there yet in the industry, and that process is still rather manual.”

Airlines set up their own rules to apply the right priorities for the right passengers, such as VIPs or connecting passengers.

Another vital point is communications. “I’ve seen a lot of cases where the airline does everything right but forgets to tell the passenger. I once tried to rebook my flight and found that I was already rebooked on a flight leaving in 50 minutes,” Kavanagh said.

Amadeus’ automated customer contact has multiple triggers for communications to customers. “It’s easier with mobiles, although we still have a few issues in Europe over roaming charges,” Kavanagh said.

Some airlines have developed in-house technology tools to deal with disruptions. Among them is American Airlines, which tackled the issues after a few well-publicized weather events about five years ago.

Susan Garcia, AA vice president of information technology, says the carrier’s Re-Accomm tool re-accommodates a planeload of passengers in less than a minute. “Before, agents would have had to look at each flight, with people queuing up. It would have taken several agents more than an hour,” she said. American developed a formula to evaluate each passenger’s needs and book flights that will get the most people to their destinations.

American’s Transfer Monitor tool “allows us to monitor connecting passengers in real time to determine who is at risk of missing their connections,” Garcia said.

The vast majority of checked bags are reunited with their owners at their destination, but that’s little comfort if you are one of the minority. More than half of the baggage problems at Dallas-Fort Worth were related to transfers, Garcia said. The process was clunky: Tug drivers used a printout that told them where to take bags from an inbound flight. The printout’s information was entered manually and could be rendered out of date in minutes by gates changes and delays.

American installed mobile computers with a web application called T-Link on its DFW tugs that provides real-time flight information and automatically updates delivery sequences for baggage transfers.

Earlier this year, JetBlue Airways was the launch customer for Sabre’s Irregular Operations Reaccommodation solution, which determines how passengers are handled when flights are canceled or delayed. Stephen Clampett, Sabre Airline Solutions’ president of airline products and solutions, says the system looks at the value of customers to the airline. With capacity at low levels, “some people will have to push to the next day,” he said.

In addition to freeing airport staff from dealing with long queues, Reaccommodation resulted in a 25% drop in calls to the carrier’s call centers.

Airlines are naturally reluctant to cancel flights ahead of predicted storms, but thinning out the schedule, coupled with an arsenal of better tools, can help avoid gridlock at airports, where there are not enough gates to deal with parked planes, Clampett said.

If dealing with the aircraft is difficult, coping with crew recovery during long delays can be a nightmare. By the end of 2012, Sabre is hoping to roll out a crew recovery module that will give airline managers a better picture of crew availability.

Clampett cautions that there is no silver bullet in dealing with disruptions. “The Holy Grail is that you push a button and solve the problem, but that’s never going to happen. They call it ‘decision support’ for a reason. You will still need human intervention.”