Flightbuddy will be exhibiting at stand 67 at this years bigger and better Aviation Festival at the London business centre 7th and 8th Sept. Come by and say 'Hi' if you are attending or send along a colleague.
Founded in 2004 Volaris is Mexico’s second largest carrier with a fleet of 64 aircraft flying domestically and internationally to over 65 destinations. Volaris selected Flightbuddy to manage their disruption communications to passengers. The service went live 1st Sept. It is a significant event for Flightbuddy as it introduces integration with the Sabre flight management system as the source of real time flight data. The Flightbuddy team worked closely with Volaris on the project to ensure a smooth launch and provide the guidance and training to make the project a success.
Service delays are commons experiences for airline customers. Passengers deem these delays a waste of their time and judge the airlines quality of service on the basis of the duration. Despite being commonplace these delays negatively affect the emotional responses and behavioural intentions of passengers. The challenge is to reduce the passengers anger and perceived length of the delay. Korean researchers1 published the first airline specific research into measuring the impact of delays on passenger sentiment in July 2015. Exploring three emotional elements, anger, uncertainty and acceptance they looked for correlations with two key behaviours, intention to repurchase and negative word of mouth. The study looked at survey results from 365 delayed passengers, a service delay being defined as the ’perceived’ delay in delivering the service from the airline in question. The results were very interesting and slightly counter intuitive. They showed that a passenger’s anger grew as the delay lengthened as did uncertainty but whilst uncertainty did not result in reduced intention to purchase or negative word of mouth the feeling of anger significantly reduced the intention to repurchase and showed a strong correlation with negative word of mouth. Such negative behaviour has a real brand and revenue impact. Acceptability, i.e passengers that accepted the delay, was found to have a positive impact on repurchase intentions suggesting that Airlines can increase acceptability of a delay by carefully timed communications on the state of the delay, perhaps even the cause and by issuing soft or hard vouchers which serve to recognise the impact of the delay on the passenger and reduce the perceived delay by giving the passenger something to do i.e. get a snack. Put simply if an airline can reduce the perceived length [...]
Frontier Airlines, headquartered in Denver fly to 58 national and international destinations. Founded in 1994 Frontier are growing rapidly and working hard to improve customer relations and reduce complaints. Frontier went live with Flightbuddy in March 2015 and are proactively notifying passengers of security delays at specific airports in addition to standard delay and flight status updates.
As part of Ryanair's strategy to give passengers free access to flight information across multiple channels they recently launched a novel new TwitterBot service that delivers real time flight status to Twitter users. Twitter users can simply tweet the flight number to @ryanairflights and receive a tweet back with the current status. Why not give it a try yourself @Ryanairflights?
Daily Telegraph 28 August 2014 In her second article exploring the reality of Ryanair's increased focus on customer service, Lizzie Porter interviews Ken O'Shea, Flight Operations Control Manager and Caroline Green, Head of Customer Service. Both highlight the value of Flightbuddy in managing 300 aircraft and over 1,600 daily flights. "Ken O’Shea, a flight operations control manager who has worked for Ryanair for 22 years, explains that they track the exact position of every aeroplane – whether on the ground or airborne – from this room. It’s also from here that the team liaise with air traffic controllers. He shows me FlightBuddy, a system that keeps track of flight punctuality, and the location of problems on the route network" "Caroline is quick to point out that FlightBuddy also allows them to email or text passengers if flights are cancelled, with rebooking and refund options." Click here to read Lizzie's full Article FlightBuddy software shows what percentage of departures and arrivals are on time. Photo: Lizzie Porter "On the wall next to the map is projected what is essentially just a spreadsheet graph, showing departure and landing punctuality levels, and how many diversions have taken place – five in the past week, according to Ken. At the time of my visit, they are showing 97 per cent of planes are leaving on time, 98 per cent of them arriving when they should. Twenty-four planes are delayed, and there’s one diversion (the Valencia flight), but the boxes showing the statistics are still green. When they turn amber, they know there is a problem."
Great way of visualising all the elements and impacts of passenger disruption.
This is the first time IATA have brought the event to Dublin and expect over 200 airlines to attend. Sentient will launch flightbuddy to airlines at the show. Oct 29th-31st Dublin Convention Center, Come and visit us at stand 51!
Up to 90,000 Ryanair passengers were affected by the two-day strike by French air traffic controllers, making it the biggest disruption to their flights since the 2010 volcanic ash cloud. The strikes continued to cause knock-on disruption for air passengers over a period of days. Large numbers of passengers were stranded as limited industrial action by air traffic controllers in several other countries - who supported the French air traffic controllers joined their protest. The action led to more than 3,000 flights across Europe being cancelled as the strike was followed by a work-to-rule by controllers in other countries, including Portugal and Italy. Flightbuddy dealt with over 200 cancellations and 300 delays, keeping passengers informed and providing them with emails.
Airlines which cancel flights will have to book passengers on rival carriers if they cannot offer one of their own within 12 hours, under a new package of EU consumer measures to be unveiled. The plans for sweeping changes to passengers' rights represent the biggest reform to the EU aviation rules since they were introduced eight years ago. Subject to the approval of member states and the European Parliament, the new laws are due to come into force in early 2015. Under a regulation known as EU261, airlines are already required to refund passengers when flights are cancelled but they have frequently been accused of trying to dodge their obligations by forcing customers to drag them through the courts to obtain compensation. Carriers in turn have campaigned for changes especially after facing a bill of more than £1bn following the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland in April 2010. They had to pick up the bill for looking after millions of passengers stranded when flights across Europe were grounded for nearly a week. Under the changes, airlines will have to pay for a maximum of three nights' hotel accommodation. The reforms will tackle some of the more controversial practices used by airlines. For example, carriers will be banned from charging passengers a fee to correct a misspelling of their name. Some airlines demand up to £160 for a passenger to correct a flight booking at the airport. "It is very important that passenger rights do not just exist on paper," said Siim Kallas, the vice president of the EU Commission. "We all need to be able to rely on them when it matters most – when things go wrong. We know that the real priority for [...]
