Free or discounted travel is one of the major perks for airline staff and acts as a key element for staff motivation and retention in the airline industry. The staff travel department in an airline manages staff travel policies and bookings but the department’s burden is further increased by tasks like identification and verification of staff, maintaining staff relations and communications, assessing applicable taxes, refunds (a cumbersome process), record keeping and interline pricing & billing. Most staff travel departments handle these loads though it affects their service levels. But the real pain starts when staff strength increases with corresponding increase in the number of travel requests to the staff travel department without additional resources in the staff travel department. The result - longer processing time and staff waiting time during working hours, with consequent adverse effects on productivity and morale. Staff starts finding it tough to use this perquisite, and it loses its charm. The pain is equal on business travel process as well. Lack of an automated workflow for managing business travel bookings results in process bottlenecks, delays and increased administrative costs.

A Real Life Case Study:
The case of an international full service airline from the Asia Pacific region that employs over 10,000 staff, illustrates the benefits of automating its staff travel processes using iFly Staff, a new-generation staff travel management system.

Staff leisure travel is a highly regarded staff benefit at this airline. With expansion and a consequent dramatic increase in staff travel requests, it became difficult for the airline to exercise effective internal control with existing manual processes. To book a leisure travel ticket, an employee had to physically visit the staff travel office and wait in a queue to submit request forms. In case of employees working at remote locations, staff travel request forms had to be sent either by post or by fax to the staff travel office at the airline’s headquarters. The staff travel officer had to verify & validate the eligibility and concessionsprior to approval. The staff travel officer then had to manually create the booking and hand over the ticket to the staff. Tickets had to be dispatched by post to employees working in remote locations. The average cycle time for staff travel bookings was as high as 7 days.

Automation of the process became an imperative need to not only reduce the workload on the Staff Travel Department but also to reduce turnaround time.

After an exhaustive evaluation, the airline chose IBS’ iFly Staff, (staff travel management solution) to address the problem and provide its staff a self serviced online environment to cater to their travel needs.

iFly Staff, empowered the airline’s staff to view their concessions and create bookings directly over the web, from a location of their choice in a few minutes. The self serviced environment eliminated long queues in front of staff travel offices to fill in the forms and the staff could do their own bookings in 2 minutes. The administration of staff travel became easier as product enabled automatic compliance to staff travel processes and procedures. Verification of the staff and reference for checking eligibilities are all automatically done through iFly Staff. Since approval workflows are maintained in the system, routing of requests and approvals happened at the click of a button. This resulted in significant reduction in the transactional/ processing load on the staff travel department. Thus iFly Staff reduced the cycle time for staff travel bookings from 7 days to a few minutes, a reduction of over 90%. The net effect was satisfied staff, increased productivity and enhanced morale as employees were able to utilize this highly regarded perquisite fully.

iFly Staff :
iFly Staff is a new generation business solution that streamlines and manages leisure travel and business/duty travel for airline staff and their dependants. It provides a self-serviced environment for your staff to manage their travel, directly enhancing the productivity of your workforce.

iFly Staff is currently implemented in seven airlines on five continents and serves over 50,000 airline employees across the globe with credible testimonials for reducing costs, increasing productivity and enhancing employee delight at some leading airlines.

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