Some Airlines Begin To Use New Tools To Re-Accommodate Passengers

Several airlines for the first time are using customer relationship management tools to prioritize traveler re-accommodation requests. Provided by airline technology companies, including Sabre Airline Solutions and Amadeus IT group, new systems eventually will enable travel management companies to automatically re-accommodate other itinerary categories, improve response time and reduce redundancy in supplier and traveler efforts to make changes.

Prior to the implementation of the newest airline IT systems, air re-accommodation was a lengthy endeavor with often redundant processes taking place between the airline, TMC and travelers.

Sabre Airline Solutions' new SabreSonic Customer Sales and Service reservation platform uses a customizable value-scoring system that measures a traveler's purchase history, total revenue contribution and past service disruptions with that airline. The scoring system gives airlines an automated measurement to prioritize travelers and uses an algorithm to define the best combination of flight options either on that carrier or others.

Air New Zealand and Virgin Blue are using SabreSonic Reaccom, which will be deployed with JetBlue Airways and Vietnam Airlines in the first quarter of 2010, according to SabreSonic Solutions senior vice president Jim Barlow, who added that Sabre plans to roll out SabreSonic to about 65 airlines in the next two years.

By moving its airline reservation and departure control systems to the same technology platform, Amadeus' Altéa Passenger Service System works off a shared profile and shared booking record that facilitates interaction between travelers and carriers.

"At least for an airline, it allows them to do proper customer servicing and really see this re-accommodation and automated processes based on the customer rather than the operations themselves," said Amadeus Americas vice present of travel technology consulting Sebastien Gibergues.

The shared booking record architecture also gives airline agents consolidated reservation and departure control system data on past delays or cancelled flights in conjunction with travelers' travel preferences to help make better customer interaction decisions.

While new re-accommodation technology is being put to use at airlines, the next step is building a bridge between their systems and travel management companies—something that sources said could happen in the next 18 months.

"An airline is only aware of your itinerary on the specific carrier and is not aware of your hotel bookings or anything else beyond that next flight," Amadeus' Gibergues said. "The agency is the one that wants to provide the service and who is aware of all the parameters."

Sabre Travel Network in 2010 plans to start delivering to TMCs an updated re-accommodation system through a phased rollout, beginning with new electronic notification capabilities through its Sabre Virtually There itinerary management tool, said vice president of point of sale product marketing Candi Clarke.

Eventually, application programming interface links, traveler value scoring systems and preferences in records databases will become sophisticated enough that they will support automatic re-accommodation.

"As we get more computing power and more of these cloud-based Web services, we're going to see these things automatically re-provisioning people," said Travelport director of commerce Jason Nash. "This will move at some point, and we are three or four years out from this to where it will effectively auto-provision."

What's left to be done, however, isn't a matter of technological advancement. Rather, it's about reaching agreements between airlines and TMCs, either directly or through their technology providers.

"Airline IT is quite strong and has been getting stronger for some time, but they have yet to really reach out to us about how we can use new capabilities via APIs to understand how they are re-accommodating our travelers so that we can do something in a more coordinated fashion about the other segments of the trip that may be impacted," said BCD Travel senior vice president of strategic marketing and technology planning April Bridgeman. "We don't yet have that automated information coming back from the airline to tell us what they've done about a re-accommodation, so it's difficult for us to make sure that the traveler finds out what has gone on with the airline and make other changes. It's a matter of priority and tough times for investment, and now that the airlines are just putting these things in place, we need to sit down and have more active, as opposed to conceptual, discussions about how we can make this work."