JetBlue and WestJet

How important is the reservation system at airlines such as West Jet and JetBlue. How does it impact operational activities and decision making? Over the past years, it seems customers have heavily relied on airline reservation systems to book their tickets, reserve seats, pay for the tickets, and check-in-online. This has been very convenient for customers to plan their trips. These systems have also allowed the airlines to manage their whole flight inventory. They have the all the information stored and recorded and maintained.
It provides a platform for communication between airlines for their “code-sharing plans” this also allows agents or other ticketing office to see real time information such as booking or seat availability (Laudon & Laudon, 2013). Because all of the parties rely on heavily on these systems it is important for Airlines Company to have it. A perfect example of the chaos that is created when one company decides to switch to a newer version of this system would be the case of WestJet.
The impact of operational activities and decision making has greatly changed with the new system. The system has helped the airlines maintain accounts with other airlines, as well as help processes internal information between departments with more efficiency since everything is done online (Laudon & Laudon, 2013). Now that customers can plan, book, and pay online for their trips it as boosted customer satisfaction with faster service.

This system has allowed airlines to make good strategic decisions on which routes to monopolize, and how to improve their services by accessing information about previous customers stored on the system. However, this system can affect customers’ decision while they are booking for example if the system is slow or not user friendly customers may be more likely to go to a different site to book their flights. Evaluate the risks of the projects to upgrade the reservation systems of WestJet and JetBlue and key risk factors. There are always risks to any business when they are upgrading their systems.
However, the biggest risk to a business is the down time that they will occur when transferring and receiving data from the old system to the new upgraded system, not to mention the time it will take to train the employees that will be overseeing the new system. In the situation with WestJet and JetBlue upgrading the reservations system had its own risks and it could only go two ways smooth with no inconvenience to the customer or horrible wrong and the customers are angry and your good name is now in trouble (Laudon & Laudon, 2013).
Despite the extensive training that WestJet had before the upgrade, it did not prepare them enough for when they went live some of the problems they had were not on the practice test environment they trained with. No one can predict that the updates to the information system will could create a defect in the system. The time it took to transfer the information to the reservation system could create a gap in the services to the customer. Having a major outage to their online services could cause major setbacks for the two companies that neither of them could afford.
Classify and describe the problems each airline faced in implementing its new reservation system. What people, organization, and technology factors caused those problems? In the case of WestJet successfully planning the development would have saved them millions of dollars, and it would have saved them many of angry customers. WestJet biggest mistake was they did not have a plan for system failure as well as the extra help at the call centers until it was too late and the issue was already out of control.
If WestJet would have planned for the time it would have took to transfer all their files to the new system, and lighted the passenger load they would bypassed all the problems they had during the transfer. JetBlue on the other hand did successfully plan the switch they decided to do the switch when the airlines were not as busy and they also decided to book fewer seats during the time of the switch (Laudon & Laudon, 2013). They also a built a backup system to prepare for the worst, and hiring temporary call center workers was a great idea this allowed them to make sure they were available for customers during the transition.
However, there were a few glitches such as wait times for calls and the airport kiosks and ticket printers were not online right away they still managed to be well prepared for any of these problems. Describe the steps you would have taken to control the risk in these projects? The steps I would have taken to control the risks in this project would be similar to what JetBlue did. I would have planned for an outage in the system and tried to look at the situation from the customer’s point of view.
The training that we have done to prepare us for this new system cannot prepare us for everything that can go wrong during the transition. I would have to look beyond what could happen and prepare for that. I would slowly move the company into the transition and prepare the customers for it as well. Maybe by letting the customers know up front that the company will be doing a transition on the reservations system will allow customers to be prepared in the case something happens while making their reservations.
Offering some sort of discount will help the customers through the transition and help keep the customers loyal to our company. On the business side making sure that we have options if something goes wrong by having a backup system we can turn to if the new system goes down. Making sure we do not over book our flights during the first few days of the transition and making sure we are all prepared and ready for anything that can happen is the only way we could overcome the situation.