Passenger & Flight Management System

Initial Situation

The customer reached out to us with the need of developing a passenger and flight management system. Being a travel house they needed to manage thousands of passengers, bookings, flights, airlines, airports - you name it.

The only systems that were in place were the two reservation systems - or Global Distribution Systems (GDS) - called Sabre and Amadeus. Bookings were - and still are - placed and managed in those systems. But they didn't really have a graphical user interface (GUI) and the client requested a special structure.

Because there was no appropriate system in place, our customer used ring binders or spiral-bound notepads. Imagine having to find a certain passenger in hundreds of pages of hand-writing while your colleague is waiting for you to finish so he can find or add another one.

Goal

The goal was pretty clear:

1. Get rid of the notepads
2. Have all information stored in a system
3. Optimize processes

Implementation

Technologies

In this particular case we went for a NodeJS backend along with an AngularJS frontend and a MongoDB database.

Project Management

For this project we followed an agile project management approach. We took elements of Scrum and Kanban and implemented those into our project management tools. In this case they were Trello and GitLab. The implementation took around 3 months and we developed following features:

Features

Passenger & Flight Management

All passenger records had a full name, contact information, routing for the flight, electronic ticket records, prices and some extras like a history. Passengers could be grouped to cases, for example if they travel as a family with same flight segments. Infants, children and adults were handled individually based on age.

With a public link that could be shared with the passenger, they could have 24/7 access to the latest booking information so they are in the loop on any schedule changes.

User & Permission Management

Every user has a role with certain permissions so he cannot access or manipulate records he is not allowed to work on.

Sabre & Amadeus Interface Integration

Since all bookings still needed to be done in Sabre and/or Amadeus, we developed an integration with their interface (API). Anytime a booking command would be entered, the data would be transmitted to our server which parsed it and stored it in the database.

Client Login

With the right user management in place it was easy to allow clients to login as well and see the records they are concerned with.

Client Interface Integration (Salesforce)

One of the clients of our customer used Salesforce and we connected to their REST API (interface) so we could exchange data automatically without writing and sending tons of emails manually. Read more about the customer interface here.

Another client had his own inhouse-system to which an integration is projected. Internally, the customer also wants to hook this system to his book-keeping and invoicing system.

Automation Features

• automated update of passenger routing
• automatically generated email summaries of passenger or case records to avoid mistakes when composing those manually
• automatic change notification for passengers and other stakeholders
• reminder function sending emails to given recipients on given date
• changes on a passenger in a case could be applied to all other passengers in that case
• many more small tweaks at different places

Data Repository & Settings

Airports, airlines, countries, etc. could be managed inside a data repository. Custom settings were also available.

Security & Data Protection

All communication is encrypted via SSL and the authentication follows standards based on JWT. 6 months after the flight of a passenger, all records associated to him are anonymized. That way his personal information is protected and we can still use the anonymous records for statistics.

Result

The customer is happy.

The data is now available in a digital format so it can be queried and analyzed - the foundation for useful statistics and reports.

With the integrations to Sabre, Amadeus and Salesforce our client and his customers reduced manual work in some progress almost by 100% - some processes got eliminated altogether. The customer tie between our customer and his clients became even stronger with these integrations.

This is a beautiful example for what's possible when companies strive for Digital Transformation. And it also shows what you can achieve by using tailor-made software.