Catering to customer expectations and avoiding flight delays

Post merger the biggest airlines company in United States had to face multiple challenges in various areas. One of the biggest issues was to cater to the customer expectations and avoid flight delays. Post merger the total number of flights being handled went abruptly high and thus scheduling all of them with ease became difficult. There were frequent changes in gate allotment to the flights which caused huge inconvenience. The premium customers who have the flexibility to check-in longer back had their boarding tickets with an allotted gate number for departure and thus they directly approach the gate for boarding without re-confirmation of any changes.

Practice

Middleware

Client

Top US Airline

Technology

Tibco Suite, Java, Microsoft .NET

Role

Architecture and Development

Copyright © 2018 Tescra

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The Challenge

A huge lot of commotion, confusion and disturbance among passengers regarding the boarding process which resulted into frequent flight delays and which in turn resulted into high customer dissatisfaction.

Business Solution

Do not print the Gate information before 3 hours of the flight departure.

Technical Solution

Used TIBCO business events to publish the trigger to display the Gate information on boarding pass exactly 3 hours before the departure. We created a solution to this problem using TIBCO technologies so that the customers checking in even one second before three hours of the scheduled departure of the flight will not be allotted a gate number and thus in response will have to confirm the gate number at the displays screens at the airport or will be informed by text message. Created triggers for each flight leg in Business events cache on receiving of flight create event i.e (Scheduled departure of the flight - 3 hours).

Technical Recovery

  1. Publish current status (flightDate/DepartureAirport): When publish current status option selected; Business event cache will publish the status of all the flight leg including the current operational Gate number for the flight leg matching Departure airport and flight date.
  2. Remove Gate (flightDate/DepartureAirport): When remove gate option selected, Business event cache will publish the flight leg events matching flight date and airport which will wipe out the gate information from the target system and customer will not see any gate information on the boarding pass.
  3. Override time (flightDate/DepartureAirport/NewDisplayTime): When selected, Business events cache existing triggers will be overridden to new time real time. i.e. Current Status of the display gate info - STD - 3 hours by selecting this option we can override the triggers to trigger STD - 2 hours or STD-4 hours etc.

the results

This project was highly appreciated by the top management and thus it resulted into higher customer satisfaction and drastic lower flight delays.