No Delays for the Holidays

It’s that time of year again for the aviation industry. Nearly 47 percent of Americans are anticipated to travel this holiday season, despite climbing flight prices and repeated cancellations. With COVID-19 restrictions easing and more protection offered from new booster vaccines, travel has picked up over the last few months. American Airlines reported a strong summer travel season and no sign of slowing down to round out 2022.

Major airlines have a lot of consider when gearing up for the holiday travel surge. Peak network and application performance is crucial to ensure smooth operations. In the last several years, outages of less than an hour of downtime have affected hundreds of travelers; other outages have caused the cancelation of thousands of flights. Some outages may have been a small inconvenience for passengers, while others resulted in tremendous frustration. Either way, the impact to airlines is sizeable—with costs ranging from $10 to $150 million depending on the incident and impact. 

In addition, with so many airlines competing for market share, delivering a positive user experience has become just as critical for gaining customer loyalty. Referencing departure times, receiving timely updates, modifying traveler details, checking bags, rescheduling connections, and booking last-minute flights are all par for the course—and exceptionally stressful during peak holiday travel. When chaos ensues, quickly locating a customer service number or chatting with an agent via the airline’s mobile app can make all the difference—if the experience is positive, that is.

Because of the unpredictable nature of air travel, leading airlines are always looking for unique ways to increase customer satisfaction and incentivize loyalty flyers. Rewards programs are one common avenue, but glitchy apps, slow processing times, and user interface issues with airline applications and websites can cause immense frustration and leave a lingering negative impression.

With all these considerations, airlines are dealing with masses of data at a time—all moving and changing at a rapid pace. NETSCOUT solutions offer the deep packet inspection at scale that is needed to support this data and drill down to identify the true root cause of network and application performance issues. When application performance for critical services such as passenger ticketing, credit card authorization, flight manifests, crew scheduling, and baggage claim operations suffer degradations, the ripple effect can be felt throughout a regional airline, an airport, and further. With swift identification of applications and locations impacted and the ability to pinpoint the true source of issues, major airlines can reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) and minimize user impact, thereby safeguarding revenue and protecting their brand and reputation.

Learn more about how NETSCOUT solutions give airlines critical visibility into the performance components impacting the aviation industry.