Airline Industry
Air travel is back, and it’s going to be bigger than ever. But more travel means more moving parts, and airlines will be under even greater pressure to serve customers’ immediate needs. Traveling is supposed to be enjoyable, but it can often be stressful, so keeping customers informed and up to date on the latest news is critical for maintaining a positive experience that keeps them coming back.
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Introduction
The airline industry is a great example of a data-intensive business that depends heavily on collecting, processing, sharing, and analyzing data. And with expectations around huge growth in air travel in the coming months and years, there will be more data than ever to handle.
Airlines have emphasized real-time responsiveness for many years, but there are still more opportunities to build a stronger customer experience through immediate action, without requiring a major overhaul. Consider the following services that can create competitive advantage for airlines:
Real-time fulfillment and notifications. What if customers could transfer miles from one account to another immediately, so they can then use those miles to buy airline tickets as part of a family vacation? Or what if customers were notified of alternative flights that could help resolve the overbooked flights? If you don’t currently have these instant services, you can leverage real-time systems to process data information immediately to promote revenue growth and greater efficiency.
Multi-channel experience. With the many ways that customers interact with airlines (e.g., web app, mobile app, SMS, kiosk, in-person, etc.), it would be ideal if all channels were coordinated so for any information updates, customers are well-informed and never surprised. Real-time messaging can help ensure all channels are synchronized in a very efficient way.
Customer self-service. Passengers are increasingly interested in quickly addressing an issue, and many times that can be accomplished via extended self-service capabilities. Whether customers are trying to redeem miles, or purchase add-ons, the ability to do so via self-service devices not only helps the customer, but also reduces service costs for the airlines.
Business Requirements
Many important business requirements in the airline industry are highly dependent on the efficiency and effectiveness of data management, thus making IT infrastructure an important part of business success. Three such requirements are:
Ability to serve many more customers. With expectations of many more travelers, clearly there will be heavier workloads in terms of not only plane and staff requirements, but also data. More data that captures customer, staff, and flight information means higher IT scale requirements, so systems need to efficiently scale out to handle growing workloads reliably and cost-effectively.
Responding in real-time. Air travel is a business where timing is everything, and if information is not delivered in a timely manner, whether to customers or to staff, then significant problems can arise. Simple delays in the IT infrastructure can lead to huge delays in operations. Other delays can lead to customers choosing a different airline. It is critical for airlines to deliver information in real-time to avoid downstream challenges and failures.
Delivering a consistent picture of operations. All businesses need to overcome the challenges of data silos. Establishing seamless connectivity between many different data sources ensures that the business is able to deliver a single view of data that represents the latest, up-to-date status. This lets customers and staff know what they need to do to ensure a successful flight. Whenever there’s an inconsistency due to a delayed update, there can be a cascade of misinformation that leads to major problems.
Check out our on-demand webinar, Three Data Challenges in the Airline Industry Your IT Team Can Solve, to see how Hazelcast can help you address key IT challenges.
Why Hazelcast
Hazelcast works with many customers who turn to us for speed at scale, security, and reliability. The Hazelcast Platform uniquely provides a high-speed stream processing engine combined with distributed, ultra-low-latency storage to run the fastest applications in any type of data-intensive environment. Consider some of the technology advantages that let Hazelcast customers run highly successful data-driven operations:
Easy to Develop and Deploy
Hazelcast Platform was designed to simplify the application development process by providing a familiar API that abstracts away the complexity of running a distributed application across multiple nodes in a cluster. This allows developers to spend more time on business logic and not on writing custom integration and orchestration code. Our platform can seamlessly integrate with your IT architecture to add new capabilities without having to rip and replace your existing stack. The Hazelcast cloud-native architecture requires no special coding expertise to get the elasticity to scale up or down to meet highly fluctuating workload demands.
Performance at Scale
Whether you process a large volume of transactions, enhance online experiences with faster responsiveness, run large-scale transformations on data, or cut costs with a mainframe integration deployment, Hazelcast Platform is designed for the ultra-performance that today’s banking workloads require. The proven performance advantage is especially valuable for data-focused experimentation that enables ongoing business optimization, especially in data science initiatives including machine learning inference for fraud detection.
Mission-Critical Reliability
With built-in redundancy to protect against node failures, and efficient WAN Replication to support disaster recovery strategies that safeguard against total site failures, Hazelcast Platform was built to provide the resilience to run mission-critical systems. The extensive built-in security framework protects data from unauthorized viewers, and security APIs allow custom security controls for sensitive environments.
Use Cases
Customers transfer miles from one account to another, or even to another partner, with the intention of immediately redeeming some of the miles immediately for a trip. This leads to revenue, so if the backend system can complete the transfer immediately via stream processing to a real-time data layer, it allows customers to continue with their travel plans and not have
Delays in informing customers across any channel, including SMS and mobile apps, are typically due to disconnected systems. By integrating all data sources in real-time, airlines can ensure they’re delivering a consistent, up-to-date picture of all their operations.
Sometimes customers can get inconsistent messages from the airline. An SMS message might indicate a delay or cancelation, while the customer’s account in a web application might suggest that everything is as planned. This disconnect of distinct data silos can be addressed with real-time connectivity across the silos to ensure a consistent view of all operations to ensure a consistent message to customers.
Customers want to be able to interact with airlines through whatever channel is most convenient. If the airline notifies the customer via SMS of a flight cancelation, shouldn’t the customer be able to ask for help via SMS as well? This type of multi-channel service requires connecting different service channels together via a real-time data layer to open new opportunities for serving customers’ needs.
Some airline services are still handled with calls to service agents, and airlines have opportunities to reduce delays due to the reliance on phone calls by letting customers address certain needs online in a self-service manner. Redeeming certain miles, upgrading flights, and even adding flight amenities such as wifi service are very easily served via customer portals that connect the different service systems in a real-time manner.