Case study: searching flights becomes easier thanks to APIs

Liverpool airport offers its passengers the option of searching for flights using the Skyscanner API without leaving its own website.
Case study: searching flights becomes easier thanks to APIs
Case study: searching flights becomes easier thanks to APIs

BBVA API Market

Liverpool airport offers its passengers the option of searching for flights using the Skyscanner API without leaving its own website.

The John Lennon airport in Liverpool (LJLA) has been the first to build and launch a search service on its website using the Skyscanner API, which connects its passengers with flight comparison data on this platform.

Booking on the LJLA website via Skyscanner saves passengers the inconvenience of having to find out what airlines fly to each destination (Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam…) from Liverpool, and helps them find the best price available for each one.

Better passenger experience

At the start of 2016 the British airport launched its new website, which is highly focused on improving the customer experience. This new development is further evidence of its ambitions in this area, helping passengers fly from Liverpool by using an API.

Sarah Barrett, marketing director at LJLA, has headed this transformation. She believes that the implementation of this API is precisely an example of the innovative approach taken by the complex.

A sector making great strides in technology

The airline sector is constantly innovating, and has certainly found a perfect partner for improving its customers’ experience in the field of APIs. Some months ago, we reported on another use case featuring an airline.

Alaska Airlines was one of the first to develop an iPhone app to allow users to access their boarding passes, a system which today has been copied by numerous airline companies. It then went one step further and incorporated an API as part of an initiative called ‘Innovation at the Edge’, aiming to develop applications that offered added value to its users and employees.

Notifications are also being revolutionized

Another US airline has also found new ways of ensuring its customer satisfaction thanks to APIs, specifically a notifications API.  The company offers its passengers the option of checking in 24 hours before their flight, and from that point on this notification service will send them any changes related to it: cancellations, delays, and gate changes, information about all the on-board entertainment services and amenities available.

The key to the notifications system contracted is the IBM WebSphere software. The message is processed through the rules motor of the operational decision manager of IBM and IBM Integration Bus (WebSphere Message Broker), and offers orchestration among multiple systems, including identity databases.

Favorable reception

The end-to-end notification process for a flight with 174 passengers –for example– may take one minute including its supervision. The result is an enhanced and stress-free flight experience for the customer.

In 2014, the company sent between two and three million different notifications in five months, and only 0.5% of the recipients chose to abandon the service. 60% of them clicked on the links in the notifications to obtain more information.

 

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