International airline Etihad Airways delivers upscale flight booking with solution built on IBM Cloud

The airline industry is going through huge transformation both in terms of providing customer service and finding new ways to provide a better travel experience.
Etihad Airways is the national airline of the United Arab Emirates and hospitality is a key part of the culture. Excelling in customer service is important and having a technology platform that enables a friendly user experience is what we want to achieve and what our travelers have come to expect.
Creating improved flight booking to help travelers Choose Well
The first touch point we chose to address is traveler check in. How can we create a technology solution that provides the same fast and consistent experience across all touch points, digital and physical? What this means is whether a traveler starts the flight booking on an iPad, then moves to a mobile phone, then goes to the airport, we want them to have a consistent, easy and intuitive travel experience.
We were looking for a partner that would enable us to achieve this objective as fast as possible. Speed to market is important because the travel industry is very competitive.
We have a strategy, which was launched last year, branded “Choose Well.” Through Choose Well, we aim to empower our travelers to choose the right product at the right price point and with the option of the right ancillaries and services to meet their needs. The marketing campaign began in late November and we had to very quickly transform our technology to match that branding experience.
Moving past established technologies and silos to land a seamless solution
One of our challenges was the fact that the airline industry uses a lot of established technologies and silo-based solutions. To provide a transparent and seamless travel experience, we needed to have the platforms in place that could deliver that flight booking functionality across all devices and all use cases.
Originally, the strategy was to build the microservices to deliver this flight booking functionality from scratch. However, doing that has some risk and time penalty. In connecting with other airline teams and IBM representatives, we learned that using the IBM Cloud, which has industry-specific solutions to the travel sector, would significantly reduce our development time by using some of the existing assets that the technology offers.
The ability to work within an IBM Garage to further speed innovation was also fundamental to our decision to work with IBM. This way, we could engage various stakeholders from both companies in a constructive way and drive an outcome as quickly as possible.
We used IBM Garage methodologies at a nearby IBM site to co-create a flight booking solution with IBM. Our companies worked together as a single team to deliver what we were looking to achieve using existing assets, microservices and APIs to connect in an easier and significantly more efficient way. With the pre-built microservices architecture, our service orchestration platform and IBM API Connect, we’re able to connect very quickly and easily to existing systems like Sabre and also to new technologies like WhatsApp.
Gaining speed, improving efficiencies and enhancing customer experience
A very quick and successful proof-of-concept (POC) project gave us confidence in the solution path. Following that proof of concept, we launched the first release of the minimum viable product (MVP) in just 15 weeks.
With this project, the team started deploying the solution in the United States to be close to our host system. It was subsequently moved to the IBM Cloud data centers in the United Kingdom and then to Germany to optimize cost and performance. Moving workload between data centers was something that in the past would have taken weeks. With IBM Cloud, it took just hours.
By working with the IBM team and using IBM Garage methodologies, we achieved our goal. We are now offering a consistent and a more innovative flight booking and travel experience to our customers across touch points.
Learn more about IBM Garage and schedule a no-charge visit with the IBM Garage to get started.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud