Teamwork and collaboration are key as travel restarts. For airlines, this means building efficient interlining capabilities that use the latest industry initiatives to simplify the business, like NDC and ONE Order. This is why Amadeus and Navitaire teamed up with British Airways and Vueling to make interlining simple and streamlined – even during disruption.
The knock-on effects of flight cancellations this year have been far-reaching, for passengers, airlines, and travel companies alike. For ticketing and ticketless airlines that interline, this begs the question: when disruptions arise, how can airlines ensure disrupted passengers get the most convenient flight available to them, and be rebooked quickly and efficiently?
Even before the current global health crisis, interline partners British Airways and Vueling decided to work with Amadeus and Navitaire to answer this question. Together, we developed a first of its kind NDC-based client app for Vueling agents to quickly and easily rebook passengers initially booked to travel with Vueling, onto British Airways flights. Powered byNavitaire’s NDC Gateway
andAmadeus Altéa NDC,
the client app makes it easy for Vueling agents to rebook passengers, and it also delivers recovery capabilities such as querying alternative offers, managing orders, and combining them with airline-specific capabilities such as disruption recovery management.
The proof-of-value, called Offer Interline Disruption Recovery, had the goal of ensuring that customers were rebooked onto the best alternative flight via a custom-built airline agent web application. For Vueling, a ticketless carrier, this eliminated the need to learn the technicalities of ticketing, undertake complex processes, and to have to contact British Airways agents for assistance. Most importantly, it helped free up agents to better serve passengers at a time when cancellations were mounting.
Blending the best of two business models with new technology to enable modern interline disruption recovery
Interlining is key for both carriers as it increases their revenue opportunities and passenger reach through an extended network. In 2017, we conducted apilot with British Airways to explore ONE Orderused in combination with revenue accounting to provide feedback to IATA and help develop these initiatives. This time, on top of exploring NDC initiatives within disruption, we wanted to resolve a difficult issue for British Airways and Vueling.
Early on in this project, we wanted to put the needs of passengers at the heart of the process, improve the efficiency of airline agents, solve problems quickly, and trial new ways of collaboration. We also wanted to deliver the highest levels of customer service, while helping the industry in the development of future interline standards.
The first step on this journey was ironing out the differences between the carriers. While they both belong to the same group – they have different business models and processes. British Airways is a ticketing carrier, while Vueling is primarily a ticketless carrier. The latter had challenges in re-booking passengers initially booked on Vueling services onto British Airways flights and reissuing the BA validated e-tickets.
In just three months, a team working across all four organizations achieved a series of important milestones. By the end of the project, the client app-enabled Vueling agents to rebook customers booked on its aircraft on to British Airways flights in just three clicks and less than three minutes. This incredible achievement increased efficiency and enabled the carriers to better support their customers. It also eliminated the need for Vueling, the supplier, to delegate complex rebooking tasks to British Airways agents, the retailer, or to learn the more complex ticketing processes.
So far, the new client app has been used to rebook passengers whose flights were disrupted because of the pandemic.
British Airways’ Head of Revenue Management, Colm Lacy, commented, “The new technology and innovative capabilities have solved an existing limitation in a short period of time while helping the industry develop new standards and frameworks. Both airlines can now operate more efficiently during disruption, taking even more advantage of our partnership.”
Industry collaboration is key to overcoming disruption
The aviation industry has never seen disruption on the scale of the first half of this year. What has become clear is that now more than ever, airlines must work together, with technology providers and industry players to facilitate better responses to disruption with a customer-centric approach. British Airways and Vueling have made significant contributions in this respect. Each change delivered here is a step in the right direction toward a more collaborative, integrated, and traveler-friendly approach to handling disruption – and we look forward to seeing the results that other airlines can achieve from future innovations in this area.
Given the value resulting from this project, IATA invited British Airways and Vueling to share the proof-of-value with industry leaders shaping thefuture of interline standards.
Together, we were delighted to share the scope, challenges, and key learnings from our pilot, and we are committed to continuing to deliver more breakthroughs to the airline industry.
Unlocking value requires airlines to embrace a new mantra, one that is focused on a simple, agile, and open approach to collaboration, access to self-service functionalities, and the latest technologies. Particularly, in the current situation, and with wider initiatives such as NDC and ONE Order, there’s no doubt that industry collaboration is important. As such, we continue to be enthusiastic in our mission to co-create, co-invest, and co-operate with airlines to meet any challenge head-on.
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