AirAsia, a Malaysia-based low cost airline, recently revealed insight on how it's utilizing Google Cloud services and a "data-first" attitude to help passenger experiences be "more personal and less friction-filled" across their network. These insights were shared at the Google Cloud Next '18 conference in London by AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes.
The overall goal of this technological effort is to remove the "friction" in air travel. Friction comes about with flight delays, missed flights, passport control, and even paper waste in the form of luggage tags. Their effort involves installing IoT sensors on their aircraft fleet to anticipate maintenance needs so that downtime can be scheduled more effectively with less passenger interruption, and also more closely analyzing the physical spaces used at airports to see if passenger foot routes are causing problems. And, on the luggage tag front, AirAsia is investigating methods that allow for reusable tags that update based on a passenger's itinerary.
Advancements are also coming to passport and immigration controls at many major airports, such as facial recognition and automated passport checks.
AirAsia is looking to also use customer data to personalize their experience, such as seat preferences, food, and more. With some investment into technology, AirAsia stands to set their flight experiences apart from other low cost carriers in their market.
As part of this project, the airline has also migrated major operations onto Google Cloud as part of a major IT overhaul. Key Google Cloud resources they're utilizing include BigQuery data warehousing and Google Data Studio for business intelligence management. They've also found great success in promoting communication between departments with the G-Suite software as well.
AirAsia has already seen benefits from their IT efforts by way of customer satisfaction and employee morale, and hopes the trend continues.
This article was based on an October 11, 2018 ComputerWeekly article by Caroline Donnelly