What JetBlue's CIO Learned About Customer Satisfaction
An interview with JetBlue CIO Charles "Duffy" Mees about what was technology's fault, what were business process problems and what was unavoidable in the Valentine's Day ice storm debacle.
The actual system we use—CrewTrac from Sabre—has potential for improvement. It took a lot of steps for crew schedulers to identify what crews were available and where were they located. We’ve worked with the vendor to improve that already.
We also have a couple of tools from Navitaire’s SkySolver suite. You take the flight schedule or the crew schedule and when things start to fall apart because of weather events or whatever, you run the current schedule through this program and it will optimize a solution for you to tell you how to get out of the jam. We had a couple of issues with those programs during the event and the vendor has identified and fixed those problems so we won’t have them again.
CIO: Sabre works with far bigger airlines than Jet Blue. Were there more robust systems available that JetBlue was not using?
MEES: They have two different levels of products. The product that we have is adequate for the size airline that we are right now. At some future date, we may need to look at replacing it.
CIO: How about the baggage problem?
MEES: The baggage problem was that we didn’t have a baggage tracking system. It was something that was on the books but hadn’t been developed yet. The big airlines track bags every step of the way . . .theoretically. Having said that, you gotta wonder how they ever get lost. But they do have a mechanism for tracking them. And we really didn’t. It had never been a big problem because 80 percent of our flights are point-to-point.
My team threw together, in very short time, a simple system so that when we scanned unclaimed bags, that data was entered into a database and put up on a web page that crew members could use to search for missing bags.
Whereas most systems track all bags, whether they’re lost or not, we’ve actually just taken a very simple approach for now. We’re going to roll this thing out into production so that when the baggage service office picks up unclaimed bags, they’ll scan them in and put them in the holding area. And then when a passenger files a claim at any airport, they can search the database quite easily to find out where it is. It’s managing by exception rather than building a big, elaborate system to track it every step of the way. It was a good first step for us. Now we’re looking at adding more functionality to that. There’s a little bit of scope creep going on.
