Amadeus - and your expalation is?

A week or so ago 485 airlines were brought to their knees when a check-in system provided by Amadeus failed. The outage was 3 1/2 hours. Qantas was probably the worst affected as the outage struck at 5pm Sydney/Melbourne time on a weekday.

The attached photo is the chaos in Melbourne airport. The resulting delays would have also caused cancellations to flights into Sydney as there is a curfew. Commuting business people throughout the eastern seaboard would not have been happy.

There's been multiple apologies in the press from various airlines to their customers that experienced major delays in check-in while manual processes were employed. But not a word from Amadeus that I can find, I was hanging back hoping there would be one - I'm perfectly happy for someone to correct me and I'll blog the Amadeus response.

The first thing to note is that most of these airlines had manual processes. A gold star to them for their risk mitigation efforts. The likes of Ryanair and Jetstar either have none or intend phasing them out as an acceptable business risk in the next 2 years. So when their 3rd party supplier of check-in software fails, you can expect not to be going anywhere, not even a delayed anywhere.

As we are are more and more encouraged (well, pushed really) to adopt technology to self-service we do increase these major risks to delivery.

Is the speed of transaction plus the ability to cut staffing levels so much cheaper when you factor in the losses of when things fail? I don't really mind when organisations such as Jestar do their sums and say 'yes' to this question. But I expect most organisations do not even consider to factor it in.

But there you go, expect to see more and more of this in every aspect of your daily life as self-service is only on the increase. Not that's necessarily a bad thing, in fact I often like to self-serve, I like the consistency of this kind of service. However, if the manual backup hasn't been factored in, the continuity of the service is compromised.

Oh, and before I close, Amadeus, we're all still waiting.