When Etihad Airways finishes decommissioning its legacy check-in software, IT maintenance costs will fall, with even larger financial benefits coming from the reduced cost-to-serve at check-in. However, the most significant benefits will be in improved passenger experiences and better understanding of customer needs—not least because check-in is the airline’s first point of contact with many of its guests.
“Variations within the region mean that we don’t always get to know the customer until quite late on in the journey,” says Papamichael. “And the check-in process is one of those really critical stages where we get to know the customer.”
The new web check-in solution also gives Etihad Airways better control over business rules and process controls, enabling it to personalize the passenger experience much more rapidly than before. Combined with new DevOps practices, this should allow the airline to bring new features and offers to market faster.
“We set IBM a major challenge to accelerate our digital transformation, and gave them hardly any time to do it,” Hanif concludes. “Our success shows the power of having a very large organization in your corner—IBM ties together the cloud platform, the industry expertise and the services to make it all happen.”
