Airlines Cannot Afford to “Wing It” This Holiday Season

If there is one thing the recent CrowdStrike outage taught today’s leading enterprises, it is that a performance issue in one area can quickly affect an entire environment—and have a lasting customer and business impact. Because of this, IT teams at companies across major industries are seeing the urgent need to take a look at their environment and put measures in place to proactively monitor the performance of mission-critical applications and the quality of user experience to improve troubleshooting when disruptive issues do occur. Planning changes in their infrastructure can also help to accommodate high-traffic events and/or cyclical business changes.

The Pressure Is On

As is true every year, the rapidly approaching holiday season puts a magnifying glass on leaders in the transportation industry. Rather than wondering if an outage will affect a major airline and its valued customers, the question has now become “Which airline will have a network or application glitch that will cause headline-making delays and cancellations this holiday season?”

Once travelers have a negative experience on a specific airline, it can be notoriously difficult to shake that memory from their mind—even if it is a subliminal bias to avoid flying with that airline again. And in an industry such as air transportation where customer experience is centric on retaining business, companies simply cannot afford to become the next holiday headline.

IT teams for today’s leading airlines need comprehensive visibility to monitor performance across their distributed infrastructure. With so many interconnected systems, packet-level visibility is vital to assure network and application performance and maintain business continuity to deliver a positive customer travel experience. And the earlier an airline sees an emerging issue, the better!

3 Critical Areas for Visibility

Here are three business-critical areas in the air travel process that require end-through-end visibility to assure performance, protect user experience quality, and minimize business risk:

1. Crew Scheduling
   Scheduling systems can be incredibly complex for airlines. There are stringent regulations and requirements for the number of hours pilots are able to work, immense coordination is required to route flight crews to the appropriate destination, and numerous personnel are needed in the right place at the right time on the tarmac for safety purposes. Performance disruptions with crew tracking and scheduling systems can quickly result in flight delays or even cancellations. These situations have made the evening news in the past and are sure to make headlines going forward. Over the past couple of years, there have been noteworthy performance outages significantly impacting travel—especially during the holiday season. Travelers’ experiences can quickly become so stressful and frustrating that they turn to social media to voice their displeasure with an airline. None of this is good for business, with the crew and pilot rescheduling issues impacting the cost of business and the negative reaction by passengers likely causing a loss in future bookings and revenue.
2. Passenger Ticketing
   Passenger booking and ticketing processes vary from airline to airline, but the fact remains the same: ticketing is complicated. The recent CrowdStrike outage clearly demonstrated the downstream effects of performance issues on many booking and ticketing systems in the transportation industry. Between rescheduling and cancelling tickets, status tiers for prioritized travelers, assigning boarding groups and seats, overbooked flights, and varying carry-on versus checked baggage allotments, there are many complexities to the ticketing process—and this just covers interdependencies within the airline system itself. Credit card and debit card payment-authorization systems and/or third-party booking systems are additional complexities that add to the challenges. Communication between each system is essential to keeping operations smooth and seamlessly sending happy customers on their travels. Any breakdown in performance along the way creates an influx of a different kind of ticket—one with the destination “IT helpdesk.” Ticketing is a foundational application service for any airline, which makes slowdowns and disruptions that much riskier to their ticket sales and revenue prospects.
3. Baggage Systems
   A recent story regarding a major U.S. airport revealed that a five-hour baggage system outage was the source of numerous flight delays, luggage backups, and frazzled passengers. Because the automatic baggage belt was inoperative, employees worked diligently to manually check luggage during the outage—taking bags down to the tarmac personally to be loaded onto various aircraft. At least one passenger expressed disappointment to the press—a situation no leading airline ever wants to see, especially when its top priority is delivering a positive, safe, and pleasant customer experience for travelers. Without continuously monitoring each piece of the baggage process—from weighing bags to transport belts to aircraft loading—a performance disruption anywhere along the way can significantly delay operations and quickly translate to unhappy customers who may think twice about their airline selection the next time they are booking travel. Revenue and customer loyalty are clearly tested in these cases, and it’s important not to overlook the impact of employees picking up the slack—which could have costly implications in overtime and employee attrition.

The Need for NETSCOUT Observability

Transportation companies need comprehensive visibility throughout their environment to continuously monitor performance. It is not enough to rely on third-party performance data or check the status of certain applications while overlooking others. Furthermore, packet-level insights are necessary to uncover the root cause of performance disruptions as quickly as possible and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). With mission-critical applications scattered throughout the infrastructure in data centers, colocations, and the cloud, end-through-end visibility is needed to give IT teams insight into performance at each essential business edge. Using NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions, IT teams for leading airlines can proactively leverage synthetic testing capabilities as well as deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale to assure network and application performance and quickly ascertain the cause of disruptions to remediate emerging issues before they impact customers, employees, and company revenue and reputation.

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, transportation leaders need to prepare their network and application infrastructure for an influx in traffic and pay close attention to all areas of their environment—from scheduling members of the flight crew to ticketing passengers to monitoring the baggage claim system. Without packet-level observability in place, performance disruptions in one if not all of these areas are bound to set off a chain reaction of delayed and canceled flights, resulting in frustrated customers. When performance issues lead to missed holiday plans for travelers, impacted airlines could very well lose business with those customers in the future—possibly forever.

Learn more about how NETSCOUT solutions help transportation leaders increase observability to assure performance and customer experience quality and prepare for the peak travel season ahead.