Rapid Cloud‑Based Rebooking for Airlines
Key Points
- The airline created an automated “dynamic rebooking” system, partnered with IBM Cloud and employed the Garage method to let customers instantly view and select alternate flight options.
- Development time was dramatically reduced from over a year to just four‑and‑a‑half months, with an initial limited rollout that performed flawlessly across all channels.
- When severe hurricanes struck, the team leveraged the cloud’s scalability and confidence built during the project to instantly activate the tool in the hardest‑hit regions, ensuring uninterrupted service.
- The experience demonstrated that cloud‑based microservices simplify problem‑solving, enable rapid global deployments, and are essential for meeting modern customer expectations.
Full Transcript
# Rapid Cloud‑Based Rebooking for Airlines **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1PgNr8VMLc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1PgNr8VMLc) **Duration:** 00:02:48 ## Summary - The airline created an automated “dynamic rebooking” system, partnered with IBM Cloud and employed the Garage method to let customers instantly view and select alternate flight options. - Development time was dramatically reduced from over a year to just four‑and‑a‑half months, with an initial limited rollout that performed flawlessly across all channels. - When severe hurricanes struck, the team leveraged the cloud’s scalability and confidence built during the project to instantly activate the tool in the hardest‑hit regions, ensuring uninterrupted service. - The experience demonstrated that cloud‑based microservices simplify problem‑solving, enable rapid global deployments, and are essential for meeting modern customer expectations. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1PgNr8VMLc&t=0s) **Accelerated Airline Rebooking Solution** - The airline partnered with IBM to quickly develop and deploy an automated, multi‑channel rebooking system that shortens rollout from over a year to four and a half months, improving customer options during disruptions such as flight cancellations and hurricanes. ## Full Transcript
good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard. Captain speaking, we are pretty much
anticipating on-time arrival. In the scenario where there's a flight
cancellation or some other off-schedule operation, we've had a system where we
find new seats and flights availability for those customers. But I think
often times customers didn't necessarily know that that was the best option for
them. What we wanted to do was create a system where they could actually see
alternate options. The goal was to facilitate a better experience for our
customers on how to get to their destination in an automated fashion on
the channel of their choice. So we partnered with IBM and specifically IBM
Cloud Platform to adopt their Garage method, pair programming, testing and
development. The original timeline was actually over a year so American
approached IBM and asked us if there was any way we could help them shorten that
timeline. From the time that we started development on dynamic rebooking until
the time that we actually had customers using it was about four and a half
months. We were kind of cautious to release this product we rolled it out to
a limited number of stations across all the channels and it really went
flawlessly. We are now crossing into a zone of
turbulence please keep your seatbelt fastened.
In our business, hurricanes, storms are the natural events impact our customers
on fairly regular basis. What happened and this is true story
the hurricanes hit and nobody said this is ridiculous our customers were being
impacted by the hurricanes immediately. Why are we mitigating risk of a
traditional rollout when we have the power of the clouds and this is exactly
the scenario that our customers need this capability. We made the decision as
a team that the tool needed to be turned on and especially in the hardest hit
areas so we did. Having the confidence to just flip the switch really came out of
the whole project from the beginning. This was a unique opportunity for us
really to embed the business side right in with the technology team. One of our
expectations when we were moving to the IBM Cloud was the scale and the hyper
scale of cloud should relieve our normal concerns around infrastructure when we
roll out an application globally. So when the hurricanes hit we put that to a test
and our confidence was there and the application worked flawlessly. I think
people will now realize that these kind of activities and integration are much
easier when we can use cloud technology and especially microservices we can
break problems into much smaller problems and those get much easier to
wrap your head around and develop. This is the technology that we need to be
adopting now in order to keep pace with our customer expectations.