Austrian Airlines joins Star Alliance Common IT Platform

Austrian Airlines is replacing its inventory and check-in systems and is joining the Common IT Platform, a Star Alliance initiative. The Star Alliance Common IT Platform (CITP), is a joint, centralised platform for customer management, hosted by Amadeus for participating Star Alliance member carriers. Alongside United, Lufthansa and other regional members of the alliance, Austrian Airlines is now launching a comprehensive migration project to oversee the staged transfer of all key airline IT systems, including inventory, ticketing and check-in, to the new platform by mid-2009.

Rainer Pichler, Vice President, Austrian IT Services, said, “With Amadeus as provider, we can lower our unit costs in order to significantly reduce both the ongoing costs of our IT development and maintenance, and the costs of reservation systems. This will enable us to simplify business processes in many of our divisions and adapt these to meet a contemporary standard. Because Austrian is joining this initiative with some key Star Alliance members such as Lufthansa and United, the companies will be able to maintain their existing process optimisation, while the removal of interfaces will let Austrian realise improvements in the service range for its customers more quickly and efficiently than ever before.”

Airlines within Star Alliance currently use their own reservation and handling systems. To make it possible for passengers to travel with a range of different Star Alliance airlines, however, the different systems need to be able to communicate with one another. To achieve this, interfaces are put in place, which normally involve costs for the airlines in question. The new CITP replaces these diverse systems and interfaces, and allows the partners to access a joint customer management platform in future.

In a first stage, Austrian Airlines’ inventory system - the heart of any airline - will be migrated to the new Common IT Platform. Working approximately one year in advance, all 150,000 flights of the Austrian Airlines Group, including the appropriate seating capacities, flight times, among others, will be mapped into the CITP. The ticketing system and the check-in system will also be migrated in a second stage, and will be operating on the new platform by 2009.

The airline currently flies to major Asian cities like Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Lao, Malaysia, Maldives, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

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