‘Nothing difficult is ever easy’ is an axiom that seems to describe global airline alliances to a tee
Ever had to dig, pry and push to get that upgrade you earned on a multi-airline alliance trip? Ron Peri has, and he’s an airline IT insider. The CEO of IT innovator Radixx International, which consults with and provides computer reservations hosting for airlines, was flying Star Alliance carrier Lufthansa between Orlando and Dubai by way of Frankfurt.
Since he was a Star elite MileagePlus flyer he booked his reservation via United, a Lufthansa partner. He had plenty of UA MileagePlus miles for the upgrade. Booked in economy, he wanted to move up to business class. Problem is, he says, “It was impossible to get upgraded, even though there were seats available. I made multiple phone calls, both to United and Lufthansa. It was an involved process to try to get the upgrade.” He finally got it, but only on one leg of the journey.
Vexing? “Oh yes, absolutely,” he says. “I find that when you’re working with these upgrades generally it’s challenging. But when you’re dealing with an alliance it’s more so.”
“One of the mottoes of the alliance is ‘seamless connections,’” says West Coast-based airline aviation consultant Jack Keady. “I’m suggesting that ‘seamless’ may not always be as it should be.”
The alliances get it. They know the product isn’t perfect and are “working hard,” says Keady, to break down the IT barriers that burden your alliance journey.
Connectivity & EnfoldingTwenty-seven carriers under its wing, the planet’s largest airline alliance is Star. Justin Erbacci is its vice president of customer experience and technology. “The biggest challenge to our industry has always been the disparate IT systems that the airlines have in use,” he says. “We have approximately seven or eight passenger service systems that we have to integrate.” Not to mention “multiple frequent flyer systems and operational systems.”
If elusive upgrades trigger consternation, awkward connections are downright maddening. Traveling via alliance from City A to City C via City B seamlessly can be, shall we say, less than scintillating. Typically, the ‘marketing’ carrier, the one from whom you purchased your ticket, flies you from A to B on their own aircraft. Thus they’re both the marketing and the ‘operating’ airline. At layover B, another alliance airline may loft you on the final leg of your journey on their flying machine. They now become the operating carrier to get you to your destination.
From the IT perspective, the choreography can be complex. That means instead of getting your onward boarding passes at the start of the trip, in City A, you have to go to the airport desk of the alliance partner in City B and get the boarding pass for the next leg.
Until a couple of years ago Star “had a terrible problem” with this says Erbacci. “We weren’t always able to check our passengers and their bags through their entire [itinerary] when they were traveling on different airlines.”
Enter Starnet, a system based on new “open” technologies. “We replaced a piece of proprietary, and somewhat limiting, technology that was used to exchange flight information with a type of ‘enterprise bus’,” he says – a transmission path on which signals are dropped off or picked up at every device along the line.
“Starnet is the foundation of our [IT] hub strategy,” says Erbacci. “With this message and routing functionality in place we were then able to build specific business logic on top of this to enable different types of systems.”
Business logic for mileage redemption, for example. Star positioned RAS (Redemption Availability) atop Starnet, “allowing the airlines to see what flights are available on other carriers for customers to book using their miles,” Erbacci explains.
To cut down on the incidence of clunky connection, atop Starnet sits a solution dubbed IATCI, short for Inter-Airline Through-Check-In. Erbacci says, “We took a spider web of 26 or 27 different bilateral connectivities and we put them all into a hub solution, so that every airline just connected into the ‘hub.’” Via the IT hub, says the Star executive, “we were able to significantly improve the success rate for through-check-ins – both passengers and bags.”
So capable is IATCI that it can handle multiple stops, more than a single change of plane or alliance carrier. Say you’re headed from Chicago O’Hare to Frankfurt on United, FRA to Istanbul on Lufthansa, and then Turkish to your final destination – IATCI can handle it.
Erbacci is quick to note that better IT doesn’t do away altogether with having to pick up a separate boarding pass en route. “There still are cases where you have to do that. And that is not a question of technology. That is a question of, mainly, regulatory issues at airports, and security issues, where sometimes the authorities require you to go out through immigration and frustratingly go back through the whole process again.”
Alas, although information technology is wondrous, it’s not magic. The realities of a fearful, fractured world, can eclipse the most elegant of IT solutions.
Getting On with ITSkyTeam Alliance is in the midst of an effort to “increase seamless and efficient transfers for passengers and their baggage,” according to a prepared release. The effort, dubbed ‘SkyTransfer,’ seems to be paying off. SkyTeam says flyer satisfaction with transfers “has improved three [percentage] points year-over-year and by eight points since the program was first introduced in 2013.”
Critical to the improvement, says the alliance release, is a passenger re-booking initiative called PNR Servicing. It allows SkyTeam airlines “to re-book and re-issue tickets in each other’s systems during irregular operations.”
Improving frequent flyer programs is another initiative, one aimed at enhancing mileage accrual and redemption. The online service “eliminates the need to call a reservations agent,” says SkyTeam, “and places more control in the hands of the FFP member.”
All of this incremental, step-by-step progress in smoothing out alliance outings begs the question: how come carriers which spend big bucks on IT can’t just purchase loads of new soft and hardware, throw a switch and be done with the problems that still exist?
“What you have right now is an industry in flux,” observes Radixx’s Ron Peri. “And the underlying issue is that airlines don’t make money on the fare, because fares have been commoditized.” They make money through the sale of “ancillary items” – food, perks, seat selection and such. They can do that neatly through their individual, stand-alone websites when the connections all involve that carrier. It’s managing this new rich new revenue stream on multiple airlines – even ‘seamless’ alliance carriers – where the problems enter in.
“The method of interconnecting airlines is based around the e-ticket,” says Peri. “And that’s an important thing,” because the e-ticket “is basically a virtual paper ticket,” one that’s not terribly brimming with consumer-facing data. “The underlying data [airlines] have on the core reservations systems are very limited when you base it on the e-ticket,” he says.
Peri asks those amongst us who can still recall such things to remember what the original paper ticket (from which the e-ticket sprang) looked like. It contained fares, fees and taxes. There was no places for any ancillary services, says Peri.
Here’s the practical upshot: When you put two airlines together, their individual websites are not part of the communications equation. “You have a traveler who is used to a very rich experience on the American [Airlines] website, or the United website or whatever,” says Peri.
But the communication of their preferences to other carriers – that aggregation of ancillaries that make the journey more enjoyable – remains limited. The culprit that hobbles the operation is the “host system;” the core with its “antiquated architecture, the system underlying the website where the [passenger name records] are stored.”
Alphabet Soup SolutionsA couple of new acronyms for your consideration: NDC and COT – the New Distribution Capability and Customer Order Transformation. Together, adherents believe they could transform the way airline e-commerce is conducted, rendering process far more (here’s that word again) seamless than it is today.
Both are under the aegis of IATA, the International Air Transport Association. The king-size organization represents some 260 assorted airlines, comprising an 83 percent lion’s share of global air traffic. What IATA does makes a difference. And what the global association wants to do right now is make things work really seamlessly, better communicating all those new ancillary airline offerings. To that end, it’s launched for development and market adoption a new, XML-based data transmission standard – the New Distribution Capability.
IATA maintains the new standard will “enhance the capability of communications between airlines and travel agents.” It will be open to “any third party, intermediary, IT provider or non-IATA member to implement and use.”
IATA contends NDC will do nothing short of transform the way airline products are retailed to corporations, as well as business travelers and leisure flyers. The new standard addresses the current system’s manifest limitations by, among other things, differentiating products, offering access to lots of “full and rich air content,” and rendering “transparent” the airline shopping experience.
In a prepared release, IATA director general and CEO Tony Tyler calls the initiative “a pro-consumer move that is unleashing innovation.”
So far 24 airlines have signed on to the effort to help pilot or deploy new NDC applications. Perry Flint, IATA’s head of corporate communications for the Americas says, “Our expectation is that widespread implementation of NDC will begin to occur in 2016.”
Customer Order Transformation is a working title. It’s still in the conceptual stages. According to an IATA document a trio of key design principles will drive the concept:
• Improved customer servicing with simpler interactions between partners
• The reduction in processes, systems complexity and cost
• The allowance for a new level of interoperability between full service carriers and low cost carriers, as well as other providers.
An IATA white paper, Simplifying the Business: Leading transformation for customer-centric air travel, sums up the impact of NDC (already going full-bore) and COT (still just a concept): “This (COT) initiative is challenging airlines’ core reservation and ticketing systems’ capabilities due to their legacy, costly and complex nature. With NDC we have simplified the industry to be able to merchandise their products. Now, we need to transform the remaining processes around order and delivery of those products whilst delivering a seamless customer experience using modern digital information.”
For now, even the name COT itself is still embryonic. It’s far from a done deal. It’s plain, however, that Customer Order Transformation, by any name, is the sine qua non before really seamless alliance travel is a reality. In the meantime, air carriers are carrying on, working out the bigger bumps and smoothing out the rougher surfaces here and there.
So, are we seamless? Not yet, but things are getting better – with the prospect of a substantive breakthrough just over the horizon.