Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification - Enhanced Service at Reduced Cost
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Real-Time Flight Status
Monitoring and Notification
Enhanced Service at Reduced Cost
Author:
Mark Tilden
Travel Technology Consultant
MDT Consulting
January, 2006
A Conducive Technology
White Paper
Copyright 2006 Conducive Technology Corp.Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification Enhanced Service at Reduced Cost INTRODUCTION For the past decade, airlines, travel agencies, and corporate travel management companies have invested heavily in technology to reduce the cost of arranging and managing travel. These initiatives have reduced the cost of booking travel, but they have also left the burden of managing and monitoring travel arrangements increasingly on the shoulders of the individual traveler. With airlines cutting schedules and service in a struggle to survive, and the rise in delays due to growing traffic, business travelers often find themselves caught in a vortex of “touchless” travel technology, anemic service levels, and tight corporate travel policies and budgets. Corporate travel departments want the savings generated by these new touchless technologies, but the costs of wasted employee time, missed meetings, and other business impacts resulting from travel delays are harder to quantify and control. Flight delays and cancellations, whether the result of weather, mechanical, or simply under-sold flights cost corporations millions of dollars in direct costs and add to the frustration and fatigue of business travel. Meanwhile, airlines, travel agencies, and corporate travel departments continue to look for ways to further reduce costs and improve customer service. One significant cost saving opportunity is reducing both the number and length of customer service calls. Every second shaved from the average customer service call can save companies millions of dollars. However, travelers are often frustrated with long call wait time and ineffective customer service. While most major airlines offer automated voice recognition or touch-tone systems for retrieving flight status information, these systems typically do nothing to help customers deal with the impact of flight changes. In addition, the proliferation of code-sharing agreements makes it increasingly difficult for customers to get the information they need because of confusion between the marketing carrier and the operating carrier. These calls not only waste valuable call center time, but end up leaving the customer with a negative experience as well. In a complex itinerary, the traveler may have to make multiple calls to various suppliers to deal with a flight delay or schedule change. WIRELESS SOLUTIONS Wireless technology, including web-enabled cell phones, SMS messaging, and voice messaging services, is a key part of providing a solution to this problem. By providing relevant, timely, proactive information and alternatives, travel management companies and suppliers can make it easier for travelers to respond to delays, cancellations, and schedule changes, while enhancing the customer service experience. Many of the major carriers offer their own wireless applications for flight status notification. However, these applications have a number of limitations that impact their www.flightstats.com Page 2
Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification usefulness. The airline applications typically depend on a single source of data—either the airline’s reservation system or their flight management system. They often don’t have information about airport delays that are likely to impact a flight even before delays appear in their systems. Mixed itineraries require the traveler to interact with multiple different systems. In addition, most airline systems don’t handle code share flights operated by other carriers. THE OPPORTUNITY Travel management companies and agencies seeking to build loyalty and enhance their value to customers have an opportunity to offer high-value notification services that provide “high-touch” service at “touchless” prices. Travelers can receive not only notification of flight delays, cancellations, or schedule changes, but the travel management company can proactively offer choices for dealing with the change, such as alternative flight options or changes to hotel reservations. Because travel management companies have access to the traveler’s entire itinerary instead of just the air segments on a particular carrier, they can also do a better job of mitigating the impacts of a delays or schedule changes on other elements of the itinerary. They can proactively setup ground transportation to alternate airports or change hotel reservations to ease the burden on the traveler. They can also insure that any recommended changes or alternatives to the itinerary conform to corporate travel policy, and provide options for in-policy travel upgrades, where applicable. This kind of proactive high-touch service increases value to both the corporation as well as the individual traveler while minimizing cost. The challenge for travel management companies seeking to implement these kind of high-value notification services has been that reliable sources of relevant, proactive information have been either hard to come by or difficult to integrate into existing applications and systems. USING FLIGHTSTATS TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER SERVICE: THREE SCENARIOS FlightStats Messenger is a powerful tool for enhancing customer service, building loyalty, and creating value. Here are just three simple scenarios where adding proactive messaging services could make a measurable difference in customer service and perceived value: Scenario 1: A Travel Concierge Service Every “road warrior” knows first hand the frustration and anxiety of sitting on a delayed flight, worrying about the impact of a missed connection. It’s not just a matter of finding the next available flight—though that, in itself, can be a challenge if the next flight is on a different carrier. It’s also the hassle and time required to change ground transportation and hotel arrangements and notify customers or associates of changes to appointments and meetings. Imagine a scenario where you turn on your cell phone after touching down on the delayed flight, and you immediately receive a message from your travel agent. The agent, having received notice of the delayed flight via a FlightStats message, has found two other connecting flight options that are within corporate travel policy guidelines and has www.flightstats.com Page 3
Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification booked what appears to them to be the best option. The travel manager simply asks that you call or send a text message indicating that you’re taking this alternate flight. Meanwhile, your administrative assistant is notified of your late flight via another FlightStats message and has discussed your itinerary change with the travel agent. Before your new connecting flight takes off, you receive a text message indicating that the appointments you had scheduled shortly after your original arrival have been rescheduled and a car will be waiting to pick you up at your new arrival time. The limousine company has also been notified by your travel agent and they have a FlightStats notification message setup to tell them when your flight actually touches down (before it reaches the gate), so they have time to arrive at the curb to pick you up. Chances are, if you receive this kind of service and support through your trip, the travel agent isn’t going to have any difficulty keeping your business or justifying their service fees. Scenario 2: A Proactive Meeting Planner Your company has been hired to organize and execute the national sales meeting for a global technology company. A major part of organizing the event is arranging flights and ground transportation for all the participants to come to a large downtown hotel. People are coming on dozens of different flights. Some flights have only one or two attendees aboard, while others carrying people from headquarters or major field offices have as many as twenty attendees aboard. All of these attendees need transportation from the airport to the meeting venue. Organizing ground transportation to pick up attendees and bring them to the hotel can be a nightmare. You’ve planned carefully and have several 15-passenger vans available to shuttle passengers. But what happens when flights are delayed and some passengers get re-routed on different flights? Receiving individual flight status messages from the airline’s flight status system would very quickly become overwhelming. What you need is a single simple status screen that you can check to show the detailed status of every flight that is carrying your in-bound passengers along with the number of passengers on each flight. The screen includes status details, such as when a flight is “wheels down”, indicating that it has landed, but not yet arrived at the gate. This detailed status gives you time to get a van from the hotel to the curb to pick up the inbound passengers. Meanwhile, if any of your passengers are moved to other flights because of missed connections or schedule changes, you or another on your team update a simple screen that lists the flights that should appear on your customized status screen, along with the names of all the passengers on that particular flight. You can directly “check off” passengers from the screen as they are picked up. www.flightstats.com Page 4
Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification
Once again, relevant proactive status data, delivered in a useful format, allows you to
deliver efficient, superior customer service at a cost that keeps your customers coming
back for more.
Scenario 3: An Airport Hotel Travel Desk
Many business hotels provide elite member services to their best customers as an
incentive for building customer loyalty. Imagine a hotel that delivers, along with the
morning newspaper, a personalized update on your travel arrangements for the day of
your departure. The check-in desk could ask guests to optionally provide their flight
information for the day of departure and on that morning provide a customized flight
status and weather report, along with the bill slipped under the door early in the morning.
Departing flight information could even be added at booking time on the hotel’s web site
or provided by the travel agent who arranges the hotel stay.
FlightStats Messenger can provide status information for individual flights, but it can also
deliver information about expected security wait times, airport and weather delays or
simple weather forecasts. Information collected at booking or check-in time can be
forwarded to the FlightStats services and a customized report with the hotel’s branding
included can be returned via email or other means for each guest. The hotel simply prints
out these reports or makes them available via the in-room TV system or other display
systems. Guests can then dress appropriately for the expected weather conditions, or
proactively make arrangements if delays are likely due to weather or airport delays.
Personalized services like these, efficiently delivered at minimal cost, is a key to
differentiating a business and avoiding the downward spiral of commodity pricing.
FLIGHTSTATS MESSENGER
The FlightStats Messenger product from Conducive Technology provides a robust and
flexible foundation for such products and services. FlightStats Messenger offers better
status notification than any competitive solution in five key measures:
1. Geographic coverage – By tracking more worldwide flights through multiple data
sources, FlightStats is able to provide definitive information for approximately
99% of U.S. flights, over 90% of European flights, and better than 75% of flights
worldwide. Coverage is continuing to improve for international flights.
2. Accuracy – Conducive Technology has invested heavily in the areas of data
collection, parsing, interpretation and error checking. The FlightStats solution
includes critical logic to handle difficult issues such as cancellations, diversions
and changing schedules. Many competitive solutions provide incomplete,
misleading or inaccurate information in these situations.
3. Codeshare Support – FlightStat’s unique codeshare logic delivers flight
information for both the operating and the marketing carriers, filling what is often
a major gap in coverage.
www.flightstats.com Page 5Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification
4. More Event Messages – By gathering information on virtually all the events that
comprise a flight’s history, FlightStats can trigger a wider variety of value-added
event messages than any competitive product.
5. Flexible Implementation Options – None of these powerful advantages are useful
if the notification system is difficult and costly to implement. FlightStat’s unique
technology platform provides several options for implementing a complete
solution quickly and at minimum cost.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Regardless of which of the implementation options (discussed later) a customer selects,
the basic FlightStats process flow is the same:
1. Define a Monitoring Rule — The traveler or travel manager defines a flight
number or set of flight numbers and the events that may occur on those flight
number(s) for which they want to be notified. These rules might be setup at
booking time by simply checking a few boxes in the booking engine next to each
flight or defined in the user's profile. For example, the traveler may wish to be
notified if a flight in their itinerary is going to be more than 30 minutes late or
cancelled. Alternatively, a meeting planner might setup similar rules for all the
inbound flights that are being used by event attendees so that ground
transportation can be adjusted in the event that any of the flights are affected.
Depending on the type of implementation selected, the rule may be setup through
a web site or through integration with other agency systems. We’ll discuss
implementation options in a moment.
2. Define the Message Recipients — Messages may be delivered to any number of
people or systems, including the individual travelers, travel managers, family or
friends, ground transportation companies, hotels or other accommodation
providers, and administrative assistants. Different rules can be setup for each
recipient so that only relevant information is delivered. In addition, because of the
rich set of events supported by FlightStats, specific events can be chosen that are
most relevant to the recipient. For example, a ground transportation company may
want to receive notification of “wheels down” events for a flight, indicating that
the flight has touched down but not reached the gate yet. This gives them
adequate time to dispatch a limousine or bus to pick up the passengers by the time
they have reached the gate and deplaned. Meanwhile, a travel manager may only
want notification if the flight arrival is delayed by more than 30 minutes.
3. Define Delivery Logic — After establishing flights, events and the message
recipients, options for message delivery are defined. These include time of day
filters. For example, a traveler may be interested in being notified of a gate
change for a flight if the notification is delivered between the hours of 7 am and 9
pm local time. Most travelers will not welcome a 3 am cell phone call that reports
that their 6 am flight is being moved to a different gate at the same airport! In
addition, delivery confirmation may be important for some messages, particularly
www.flightstats.com Page 6Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification
when email is selected as the delivery mechanism. If confirmation is not received
within a specified period, an alternate messaging mechanism can be initiated.
4. Set the Delivery Mechanism — Status messages can be delivered via several
mechanisms, depending on the implementation. Email is often the simplest
method and can be delivered to desktop, wireless notebooks, as well as many cell
phone/PDA devices. Other message delivery options include SMS messages,
dedicated mobile applications, or voice systems. Because FlightStats can deliver
messages in XML form, message information can even be integrated into existing
travel management applications.
IMPLEMENTATION OPTIONS
The advantages of a proactive notification service in terms of cost savings as well as
improved customer service are obvious. However, none of these advantages makes any
sense if the cost and time to implement the service are prohibitive or if the solution isn't
flexible enough to meet the specific requirements of the implementation.
Conducive’s FlightStats product is based on unique proprietary architecture that offers at
least three approaches to implementing such a system. Each of these approaches has
tradeoffs in terms of flexibility and integration with other systems verses implementation
costs and schedule. However the full power of FlightStats’ extensive airline coverage and
detailed event tracking are available, regardless of which implementation strategy a
customer chooses.
QuickStart
The FlightStats QuickStart option provides the fastest time-to-market and lowest
implementation cost. Branded notification email messages, created from a simple
template are delivered based on rules and recipients defined through a simple web user
interface. Email messages can be generated in multiple languages and custom email
template design services are available. Short text emails or SMS formats are also
supported in QuickStart.
This QuickStart implementation allows a new FlightStats customer to get up and running
in a matter of days with very little up-front cost. The tradeoff is less flexible message
delivery and formatting and no voice messaging capability.
Figure 1 – FlightStats QuickStart Integration Option
Third Party Message Delivery
FlightStats customers can also choose to integrate the FlightStats notification system with
a third-party message delivery platform, such as CenterPost Communications. These
third-party platforms offer message delivery to a wide variety of devices, including
enhanced email capabilities, voice messaging, and wireless devices. They also typically
www.flightstats.com Page 7Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification include sophisticated logic that allows messages to be delivered to multiple devices or recipients based on user-defined rules. The FlightStats system is seamlessly integrated with the message delivery platform so that users interact with only one system for definition of messaging rules and delivery options. This option requires more integration effort and a longer implementation time, but offers more flexibility in message delivery and support for voice messaging. Figure 2 – Third-party enterprise messaging implementation XML Integration The FlightStats product has native XML input and output interfaces to set rules and generate messaging events. In situations where an agency needs tight integration with existing systems or where an internal messaging system already exists, the FlightStats XML interface provides ultimate flexibility for integration with existing systems. The agency system creates an XML message to setup a rule for message delivery. When an event occurs that matches a pre-defined rule, FlightStats generates another XML message that describes the event. FlightStats can also be configured to send an event email in addition to the XML output. Conducive Technology offers a complete set of design tools to help integrators create XML input messages and parse the response messages, easing the integration task. Figure 3 – Direct XML integration with agency systems www.flightstats.com Page 8
Real-Time Flight Status Monitoring and Notification
Table 1 summarizes these three integration strategies and their tradeoffs:
Integration Strategy Advantages Disadvantages
QuickStart The lowest cost and No voice messaging
fastest time-to-market
solution. Limited email
customization
A great first step toward
a more extensive Limited delivery logic
integration
3rd Party Message Powerful message Some additional
Delivery delivery options (email, integration effort and
text, voice, wireless) time
XML Integration Tightest integration with May require more
agency systems substantial integration
work.
Lower message delivery
costs No voice messaging
(unless the agency has
its own system)
Table 1 – FlightStats Integration Options and Tradeoffs
SUMMARY
In today’s highly competitive and cost-sensitive travel market, customers expect
premium service at discount prices. Providing useful, relevant and proactive information
to travelers not only reduces costs by avoiding customer service calls, it enhances value
with improved customer service. FlightStats Messenger offers a proven, powerful
solution for flight status notification with better coverage, higher accuracy, more detailed
information, and more integration options than any competitive product on the market
today.
FLIGHTSTATS NORTH AMERICA FLIGHTSTATS EUROPE
Conducive Technology Corp. Lennoc BV
735 SW 20th Place Arnhemsestraat 47
Suite 220 6971 AP Brummen
Portland, OR 97205 USA The Netherlands
Tel. +1 (503) 274-0938 Tel. +31 (0) 575 567046
Fax +1 (503) 274-0939 Mob. +31 (0) 651 959568
Fax +31 (0) 575 563042
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