How important is the reservation system at airlines such as West Jet and JetBlue. How does it impact operational activities and decision making?
Over the past years, it seems customers have heavily relied on airline reservation systems to book their tickets, reserve seats, pay for the tickets, and check-in-online. This has been very convenient for customers to plan their trips. These systems have also allowed the airlines to manage their whole flight inventory. They have the all the information stored and recorded and maintained. It provides a platform for communication between airlines for their “code-sharing plans” this also allows agents or other ticketing office to see real time information such as booking or seat availability (Laudon & Laudon, 2013). Because all of the parties rely on heavily on these systems it is important for Airlines Company to have it. A perfect example of the chaos that is created when one company decides to switch to a newer version of this system would be the case of WestJet.
The impact of operational activities and decision making has greatly changed with the new system. The system has helped the airlines maintain accounts with other airlines, as well as help processes internal information between departments with more efficiency since everything is done online (Laudon & Laudon, 2013). Now that customers can plan, book, and pay online for their trips it as boosted customer satisfaction with faster service. This system has allowed airlines to make good strategic decisions on which routes to monopolize, and how to improve their services by accessing information about previous customers stored on the system. However, this system can affect customers’ decision while they are booking for example if the system is slow or not user friendly customers may be more likely to go to a different site to book their flights. Evaluate the risks of the projects to upgrade the reservation systems of