Taking Staff Travel to the Next Level
Client Overview
The customer is one of the largest carriers in the Middle East region, catering to over 100 destinations worldwide and serving approximately 20 million passengers annually. The airline has a strong multicultural workforce of roughly 25,000 employees from over 150 nationalities.
The Context
This tech-savvy carrier was using IBS Software's customized staff travel solution to manage staff travel right from its inception. A change in the technology landscape and policy management for a diversified 25,000+ workforce spread across the world resulted in considerable operational costs for the carrier.
Legacy batch data integration and the expiration of reservation system interfaces led to manual overheads and, in turn, mounted on to the carrier's challenges.
The airline was looking for the right solution to automate the carrier's complex staff travel policy, improve lead time, and follow global standards & compliance requirements.
Even though the on-premises customized staff travel solution was a perfect fit for the initial ten years, it was incapable of matching the airline's growth. Regulating benefit misuse while ensuring adequate benefits to all its employees was a significant challenge for the airline.
Key Challenges
Complex policy
During the initial years, most airline employees were working from the headquarters and the airline practiced a simple staff travel policy. As the airline grew over ten years, employees working in different parts of the world also increased. Numerous new policies and practices concerning travel benefits for employees and their dependants were introduced, to improve employee morale.
Increasing Operation Cost
As the business model evolved, the airline launched new types of travel. The on-premises system was not able to meet frequent changes to the policy and policy exceptions, which required a lot of manual intervention. This resulted in higher operational cost as well as amplified the overheads of the staff travel team. The cost of managing the data centre, the hardware cost, software license cost, and IT support cost made maintaining the staff travel solution financially unviable for the airline.
Technological obsolescence
The outdated technology framework of the solution had technical limitations. Inability to support the latest browser versions and mobile devices, and increased lead time for data processing affected the end-user experience. Technology limitations prevented the online sale of hotel inventory and ancillaries such as ticket upgrades.
The Solution
After a detailed evaluation of different products available in the market, the airline chose to migrate from IBS Software's customized on-premises solution to the iFly Staff SaaS version - an industry benchmark to manage the complex staff travel policies. Its simple design to launch new policies, new travel types, and the ability to modify them at any point in time proved a perfect solution to the airline's challenges.
Positive employee morale
The iFly Staff team helped the airline re-engineer several policies and provide the best value to its employees.
- Long Service concession was one of the new initiatives. It provided discounted tickets to the employees who were committed to the company for more than five years.
- "Best performer tickets" was an initiative which granted free of charge tickets to the best performers in the company.
- The sharing of concessions between different passengers, gave employees the flexibility to pass unused concessions to other family members or friends.
- Discounted tickets for friends (buddy tickets) helped employees to explore travel opportunities with their friends as well. The waiting period concept in iFly Staff regulated the sale of such tickets to commercial passengers and avoided revenue leakage.
Improved Productivity
With around two decades of experience in the staff travel domain, the iFly Staff team proposed simple solutions to the complex problems faced by the airline.
- For instance, the ZED Fares module in iFly Staff ensured that the IET (Interline e-Ticketing) on other airlines is automated even when fares are not filed by other carriers. Automation of manual processes such as the IATA 788 letter, consultant travel, annual leave travel, and retired employee travel helped the airline to completely eradicate the operation expense incurred for these activities.
- iFly Staff's Business Rules Engine was also capable of handling complex policies and processes from both points. On one side, the airline was able to define new policies for a large set of employees like in the case of a new subsidiary company addition or new office locations. On the other side, it could manage policy exceptions at an individual employee level.
- The iFly Staff implementation provided users with a lot of information related to their bookings, policies, and eligibilities. This resulted in a drastic reduction of call centre volumes and enabled the airline to run its staff travel operations without a call centre.
Regulatory Compliance
The iFly Staff solution follows global best practices and standards to ensure that all customers comply with industry regulations. Migration to iFly Staff ensured the airline's immediate compliance to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), thereby avoiding any data security and legal challenges. The cloud provider-agnostic nature of iFly Staff SaaS helped the airline to follow government regulation to maintain employee data within the country.
Rich digital collaboration with partners
iFly Staff has a robust HR (Human Resource) management module which can consume passenger data from multiple sources - be it active employee, former employee or contract employee. This ensured continuous sales and operations for all types of airline employee travel.
The migration to iFly Staff SaaS successfully transformed the airline's staff travel IT business to a new generation cloud-based solution. The migration significantly reduced the license and maintenance cost incurred by the airline as part of software licenses, hardware procurement, security infrastructure, IT operations, and maintenance.
The launch of iFly Staff Mobile was another technology game-changer for the airline's employees. Now the employees could book flights, manage their bookings, and check flight loads anytime, anywhere and on a device of their choice.
Key Results
With the implementation of iFly Staff, the airline was able to accomplish several benefits for staff travel management.
- Successful re-assignment of approximately 50% of agents from the staff travel administration department by process automation and closure of the call centre
- More than 25% of cost savings by policy enforcement and reduction in IT infrastructure cost
- Successful staff travel policy transformation for the entire airline group, for improving the airline employee morale
- Significant reduction in lead time for staff travel operations
- Compliance to international and domestic regulations for data security
Best-in-class self-service platform for airline employees by embracing industry best practices in iFly Staff.
- Automation of 15+ different types of staff travel
- Seamless management of 200+ unique travel policies
- Supporting travel of approximately 300,000+ staff and beneficiaries
- Average of 50,000+ passenger segments processed per month
The airline's decision to continue working with IBS to take staff travel to the next level, even after ten years is a true testimony of how the airline valued iFly Staff team's competence and relationship.
