Airlines will now be able to get a lot closer to their passengers – including their likes and dislikes - thanks to an innovation called Customer Journey, from the airline IT specialist, SITA, which provides a “live” record of the passenger’s experience with the airline right down to seat preference, meal choice and the last time they made a complaint.

SITA is the first airline passenger management system provider to migrate from the use of a legacy Passenger Name Record (PNR) - the historical standard for data storage - to a new generation Customer Journey record which provides reservations agents with real-time customer data through a single open integrated data base.

Francesco Violante, SITA CEO, said: “Customer loyalty has never been more prized than in today’s market where the global economic downturn means fewer passengers. The information available through Customer Journey includes service experience which allows the airline to ensure no repetition of any disservice. We are pleased to have delivered this on schedule as part of the expansion of our Horizon passenger management portfolio. Other innovative modules will follow.

“In the near future Customer Journey will also provide data to support business intelligence gathering, analysis and reporting. Airlines will be able to extract information for use with revenue management and other airline systems.”

Customer Journey is a new feature of SITA’s Horizon passenger management portfolio used by 138 airlines and several of them have already been to SITA’s demonstration facility in Atlanta, to see the new functionality in action during beta testing.

Dato Rashid Khan, Malaysia Airlines Commercial Director, said: “We have never before had real-time access to airline bookings for business intelligence applications and rapid retrieval of customer journey records across multiple search criteria. We are looking forward to seeing the impact it will have on our business when we introduce it.”

Customer Journey is an early deliverable in SITA’s next generation passenger management programme on which it is collaborating with Oracle, the world’s largest software company. The overall objective of the programme is to migrate reservations, inventory, departure control and ticketing systems from legacy to open systems using Service Oriented Architecture. Customer Journey is an example of the phased approach adopted by SITA and Oracle.

Customer Journey will be further developed to capture additional data such as hotels, car hire, trip insurance and other travel related services. It will display all revenues attributed to the customer which helps determine the customer’s overall value to the airline.

How Customer Journey is better
- All journeys past or future can be managed from a single view
- The record is always ‘live’
- CJ removes the necessity of searching in a separate past date database of records older than 120 days (which was previously the limit for stored passenger information)