Air Transat’s rapid and efficient response to compensating their passengers for flights cancelled due to COVID-19.

Business Challenge/ Context

Beginning in March and April 2020, most airlines around the globe were forced to cancel almost all of their passenger flights in order to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Air Transat issued vouchers to passengers that had their flights cancelled, covering the complete cost of the flights plus any ancillary items purchased in advance such as seats and bags.

But when travel became possible again months later, the only means by which to redeem these vouchers involved customers phoning the call centre to have agents manually process the vouchers. This non-automated handling was consuming considerable call centre resources, and also resulted in much customer dissatisfaction as waiting for an agent to become available could leave customers holding on the line for quite some time.

Air Transat went looking for a way to automate this process.

Solution

Air Transat had been provided a means for agents to create travel disruption vouchers, and a way for the vouchers to be recorded as a form of payment, on their Central Reservation System (CRS). As Datalex was already the internet booking engine provider for Air Transat, they were asked to design a solution for validating and fulfilling the vouchers.

On Air Transat's payment page, Datalex provided a way to enter voucher numbers for any passengers in possession of a voucher. A single passenger can even use more than one voucher at a time. The vouchers are first checked for validity against the CRS, and if validation is successful the customer is immediately informed how much each voucher will deduct from the amount which must be paid by credit card.

Once the customer has applied all the vouchers and is satisfied with the result, they just hit the Purchase button to proceed with booking and ticketing their travel. Now agents are responsible only for issuing the vouchers, and are no longer involved in the process of redeeming them.

Results/ Impact

After just a few months of development from Datalex followed by a successful UAT, the travel disruption voucher as a form of payment solution went live at Air Transat on the 1st of October, 2020. The benefits of this development are increased customer satisfaction, and less burden on the call centre.

“Since our Go Live yesterday with the new voucher payment feature, I can report that vouchers have been used in more than 5% of all transactions. We see bookings paid by voucher only as well as voucher plus credit card. It was a very smooth delivery. No issues to report so far. Congratulations to the team and great job!”

Joe Montecalvo
IT Solution Director, airline e-commerce systems at Transat