Streamline group booking processes for transavia.com

Transavia – From 3 Hours to only 3 Minutes

The Initial Situation at Transavia France

Tour operators supply their passenger data to Transavia France in extremely different ways. Ideally, these are digital files (Excel, e-mail or PDF); however occasionally this still takes place in paper form. Manual entries must be made in New Skies for all of this data to ensure that the tour operators’ passengers are transferred to the check-in systems using the standard process. Entry into the New Skies system is all that guarantees that the passengers will be able to check in without difficulty on the day of their flight.

Transavia France has only been on the market since the beginning of 2007 and expects to see a substantial increase in the booking numbers from tour operators as of July, 2007. The manual process of logging in would keep several employees busy only keying in the tour operator bookings from SkySpeed into the New Skies system.

The sister Transavia Holland already has its own B2B processes that are to be implemented at Transavia France, as well, in April of 2008, according to current planning.

The Prologis Solution

To bridge the time gap consisting of months before implementation of the final solution, Prologis proposed the following course of action in logging the tour operator passengers into the New Skies system:
A standard format that the tour operators should use in sending passenger data to Transavia France is defined in digital form. In addition, a desktop application is created that is capable of importing the passenger lists received. During the next step, the appropriate bookings are generated directly, using the New Skies API. In the process, the LID and AU values of the respective flights are automatically modified so that the manual effort required solely to make the bookings is minimized considerably and the revenue management, as well, must no longer be modified manually like the LID and AU values, once the bookings have been made.

Transavia’s Experience

The approach was executed in very little time, so that the “BNL Tool” has already been in productive use in Paris Orly since the beginning of July.
The initial experience has been extremely positive.
For example, Marie-Rénée Marraud, the person responsible for B2B, says: “We are very pleased about the fact that bookings can now be made in New Skies many times more quickly than before. The fact that Revenue Management no longer needs to subsequently modify the LID and AU values, also relieves us from doing more work. Now, this all takes place automatically!”

Thanks to the new desktop application, the time needed to log in the tour operator passengers for a full charter flight with 189 seats has changed as follows:

1. Manual booking of the passengers in SkySpeed

-> a.1 (1 passenger) – 1.5 minutes (for e.g. 3 passengers + small child)

-> b. 189 – 284 minutes, or 3 – 4.7 hours per full charter flight

2. Automated booking of passengers using the new desktop application

-> a. 1-1.5 seconds per booking

-> b. 189 – 284 seconds, or 3 – 4.7 minutes per full charter flight

This reduces the manual processes to validating the data supplied by the tour operator and possibly making the necessary inquiries. Even though these manual processes often take considerable time at the beginning, due to errors that the tour operators make, it is all the more important to note that the process of generating the bookings now hardly takes any time at all.