Airline data quality is essential to the airline distribution industry, ensuring smooth and reliable search and booking experiences for travelers. When real-time, accurate data isn’t maintained, it can lead to booking failures, inconsistent search results, and lost revenue opportunities for travel sellers.
In July, when a global IT outage disrupted flights worldwide, it not only hit airlines hard but also created significant challenges for travel sellers. The outage lasted 72 hours, leading to over 16,000 cancellations and disrupting customers’ booking experiences globally.
Thanks to Athena, Atlas‘s AI-powered monitoring system, we were able to take action even before the news hit the media. Within 10 minutes, Athena automatically disabled 50 impacted airlines on our Air Travel Retailing and Information Platform (ATRIP), reopening them for booking as soon as they were back online. By doing so, Athena prevented unavailable airlines from appearing in search results, minimizing disruptions and ensuring a smooth experience for sellers and travelers.
This advanced airline data monitoring system safeguarded travel sellers from failed bookings and the cascade of issues that could have followed.
Who is Athena?
Athena is a unique software solution we designed in 2022 to automate airline data monitoring and booking quality control.
It delivers 24/7 support to the Atlas team as a quality monitoring specialist known for its unmatched accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.
“Monitoring the performance of over 150 airlines is key to our quality promise to customers,” – says Liujie Yang, Atlas’s Chief Technology Officer.
When we began scaling up our platform and integrating more low-cost carriers, we knew we needed an effective, modern solution to constantly monitor the airlines and verify our issued bookings. We could have hired a monitoring team, but instead, we created Athena.”
Athena Makes a Difference
Real-time Airline Monitoring
Athena controls search and booking quality to save travel sellers and their customers from trouble. Athena is always on the lookout, constantly scanning airline systems to detect disruptions instantly. If an airline goes offline, Athena quickly removes it from the booking platform, preventing customer frustration and easing the load on customer service teams. Once an airline is disabled, Athena keeps checking it every 10 minutes and re-enables it as soon as it’s back online.
Maintenance Support
If an airline’s website and API don’t respond to Athena for longer than a set period, it signals that human intervention might be needed. Athena sends automated notifications to the entire Atlas team at every step, alerting us when it needs help to get the airline back online. Our technology and air content teams then step in to handle the issue.
Booking validation and quality fulfillment
Athena ensures all bookings issued by Atlas are accurate by matching booking details with the information in the tickets issued by airlines.
It reviews and confirms passenger and flight information, along with details about purchased baggage, meals, and selected seats.
If Athena spots an error – like missing baggage or an incorrect passenger’s name – it notifies our Customer Service team to resolve the issue right away. Athena also picks up when airlines change their rules (for example, baggage allowance) and saves travelers from potential problems at check-in.
More than automation: AI-plus functionality is underway
Launched in 2022, Athena was Atlas’s very first ‘digital employee.’ More than just a tool, Athena is a trusted partner for our team and our customers.
Athena helps us efficiently monitor over 150 low-cost carriers worldwide in our system. It helps us track their performance and ensure that we provide reliable data to travel sellers at any single time.
By combining real-time monitoring, data validation, and automation, Athena offers a comprehensive solution to the complexities of airline data management. It automates routine tasks and minimizes human errors, freeing up time for innovation and growth instead of troubleshooting.
Right now, Athena is being trained to analyze historic data about airline stability and performance, main reasons why they have been disabled, and predict how long they might be unavailable.
In the future, Athena will be able to make decisions and take action based on existing historic data – it will be capable of automatically switching from one distribution channel to another (for example, if there is an API issue, it can switch to the HTML connection) or activating an alternative payment gateway. This way, we can further improve bookability rates for our customers and provide better experience to travelers.
While the industry keeps calling for more standardization and unity in how we manage data, the reality is that we are still a long way from a perfect synchrony. We need solutions now, and AI-powered automation is one way to solve this problem.
These tools don’t change the fact that the industry players need to work together to improve overall data quality and the way we exchange information. But it’s in our power to employ cutting-edge technology to deliver high-quality services today and protect travelers from poor shopping and booking experience.
Stay tuned for more updates!
