For organizations to be successful, it is imperative to adopt new technologies and have strong manpower force to serve their customers in the best possible way. And, when InterGlobe Technology Quotient (ITQ) successfully accomplished the Air India (AI) migration project, it once again proved the immense importance of embracing new technologies and strategic process management coupled with effective management.

 

In 2018, when Travelport won contract for being the sole distribution supplier to Air India, the Indian national carrier, there were concerns from OTAs, TMCs and travel service providers for seamless migration of data from old GDS to Travelport Smartpoint.

AI migration project was one of its kind from Indian and global perspective, due to its big size of data migration. The project included around 3.5K new customers and 3-month cycle which covered all the aspects of provisioning, capacity upgrade, installations to integration, and customer trainings. As these new customers included long tail agencies, which have been on the competition’s platform for a very long duration, they needed focused efforts in installation/integration, trainings interventions and PNR migrations, and this primarily, was the main concern of customers and Air India as well.

 

The solution was to introduce a streamlined process for Sales, Trainings and Support while pre and post onboarding. In order to mitigate the risk associated with migration of live PNRs from competitor’s GDS to Galileo, ITQ used their technology stack and their own local product line (VR3), carried out extensive tests to enable migration of live PNRs and manage any change on Galileo. This ensured zero risk for this massive migration project in India.

 

As the primary reason for clients, to choose Travelport as their GDS operator was content gap, ITQ was able to create an opportunity to improve service experience. Further, the value differentiator has been the power of the platform – the host of benefits Travelport Smartpoint offers and also the ease of operation for users to migrate to Travelport by using the translation feature. Apart from basic ticket issuance, ITQ used the RCB and TMP functionality to help agencies see the plethora of opportunities to upsell and increase their revenue while being a true consultant to a traveler.

With a structured approach to the AI project, 35 trainers across the country, 125 help desk resources available round-the-clock and a very experienced expert team of 15 management professionals were aligned to guide the support functions.

AI booking procedures on Galileo were created in 6 different languages, and the instruction videos were disseminated among all the customers through online platforms. Social media campaigning was also undertaken during the process to reach maximum OTAs, travel agents and TMCs. In order to ensure faster onboarding of new agencies, a very concise AI training module was also created. Further, ITQ conducted 2 shifts of training across their centers to upskill 5000 agency staffs. In addition to this, onsite floor support of account managers was also provided throughout the migration project.

 

All the agencies had a hassle-free and seamless migration, all larger OTAs and MNA sailed smoothly. ITQ migrated over 3500 agencies, 100 large and about 100 mid-size, rest being the long tail for Air India. AI migration was overall a successful and learning project in the GDS history worldwide owing to the fact that an airline holding 15% market share migrated to a GDS platform so efficiently.