The pandemic, coupled with the Great Resignation and rising inflation rates, has created quite the turbulent ride for airline operators. Though passenger numbers are getting closer to pre-pandemic levels, many airlines are still looking for solutions to create the best experience for crews and passengers.
The ongoing challenge in hiring pilots and crews makes it more difficult for airlines to keep up with passenger demand, leading to potentially cancelled or delayed flights. To help airlines provide the best possible passenger experience and ensure customer loyalty, they must start with providing their crews with the same level of experience.
Airline operators can turn to the latest in crew management technology, such as automation and tech integration, to achieve this improved experience. Here are a few of the newest solutions to better support your crews, improve passenger experience, and in turn, support your bottom line.
Strengthen your schedule management
With daily updates and some last-minute changes in flight schedules, it’s important to ensure that your flight crews are up to date and accounted for. This is especially necessary when their schedule includes plans for a layover or changes the originally planned location for a layover.
With a comprehensive crew management system (CMS), airline operators can manage both regular and irregular crew schedules, as well as their crews’ lodging and transportation between shifts. Plus, TA Connections has a network of discounted rates at hotels around the globe, which provides cost-savings to your teams.
TA Connections’ 25+ CMS integrations enable this planning plus real-time updates to changing schedules, ensuring that all crew members are accounted for and have the information and resources they need to remain comfortable, confident and successful in their role. And when your crew feels secure, they’re able to focus their attention to ensuring the best passenger experience.
Automate crew’s logistical needs
Crew management comes with numerous manual operational tasks that are crucial to airline success, but require time that your teams might be able to better use elsewhere, like with passenger-facing duties. As the saying goes, time is money, so airline operators should look for ways to cut time – and costs – on these tasks.
That’s where automation comes in.
As cross-functional information is regularly exchanged, crew members are expected to manually enter this information between systems. With robotic process automation (RPA), up to 97% of manual, tedious tasks like these can be automated, which frees up your team to focus on other business-furthering initiatives.
Provide self-service options
When flights are cancelled or delayed, both crews and passengers need the most up-to-date information and resources to find another flight or reschedule accommodations. And when that information is not readily available to passengers via their mobile device, they’re traditionally required to stand in line – for potentially quite some time – before a customer service representative can help them.
Wouldn’t it be easier if crews and passengers could manage such change themselves? They can. With simple integrations, self-service options can be provided through your airline’s app directly to travelers. These do-it-yourself options can enable disrupted travelers to easily manage their accommodations and flight rebooking, while allowing crews to provide support to passengers with e-vouchers and extra assistance as needed.
Giving passengers self-service options frees your crew members from manually handling passenger rebooking and supporting one person at a time, allowing them to provide additional help as needed.
Happy crews, happy passengers
Supporting your airline crews helps them be more successful in their role. Their success translates to passenger satisfaction. And passenger satisfaction contributes to greater customer loyalty and better business outcomes.
As customer loyalty drives more bookings and CMS solutions and crew automations provide cost savings, your bottom line is supported from end-to-end.
TA Connections wants to ensure your airline is set up for success as the airline market continues to grow. Learn more about our solutions for your operational needs.