JetBlue.com, the airline’s website, was apparently operational again today by 3 p.m. EST.
The airline, which is transitioning this weekend to SabreSonic as the host of the airline’s reservations system, had planned to take down the website at around noon on Friday and to bring it back up this afternoon.
Such reservations systems transitions are massive in scope, and from outward appearances, JetBlue was doing everything right — at least in terms of transparency to the customer.
There was a link at the top of the JetBlue.com homepage this afternoon for customers who may have been experiencing lingering website issues.
At about 2:15 p.m. EST today, JetBlue tweeted: “Track our Sabre cutover progress on our blog http://bit.ly/b9UCT2 How was your travel experience today? Let us know.”
On JetBlue’s B6 Blog, the airline says it started planning the switch around two years ago, and pointed to some of the actions it took to keep disruptions to a minimum.
“We have proactively pulled down 56 flights and capped the remaining flights at 40% load factors in the morning on Jan. 30 up to 60% load factors on Jan. 31. If a Customer misses his/her flight due to long check-in times, we are well positioned to get them on the next flight.”
A video on the blog had officials discussing the effort and precautions that went into the transition, with officials noting that the changeover is not a one- or two-day affair, and that it will probably take until around Presidents’ Day, Feb. 15, before the kinks are worked out.
I haven’t seem any immediate press reports about major disruptions.
Related posts:
The NEW Sabre Interact system – and that really is a misnomer – is based on a 60+ year old command-line program. Sabre has attempted to put a GUI on the front-end and it has been a dismal failure. The interface still must mesh with and follow the same protocol commands used in the old program. As a result, the program is NOT intuitive and is difficult to learn. Various operations are now much more complicated – for instance, rebooking a ticket is now 6-steps, repricing a ticket is now 11-steps, an exchange is now 35-steps and a refund-reissue requires a whopping 74-steps… YES, 74-STEPS!! Don’t blame the JetBlue agents on the phone, blame Sabre!
The issues at WestJet clearly showed the flaws with Sabre’s Interact program. Unfortunately, JetBlue was too far along the migration path to turn back. I think that JetBlue will ultimately survive this customer service nightmare, it’s just really sad that Sabre has screwed them over just like they did WestJet.
Two conversions to Sabre and nothing but problems. Sabre blamed all of the problems on WestJet when time, and now the issues with JetBlue, clearly show that the issues and blame clearly lay with Sabre. I read yesterday that Sabre is now going to pay WestJet “compensation” for all of the problems they had, and still continue to experience. I hope JetBlue also pushes for compensation.
These two examples should make any airline executive pause before even considering a move to Sabre Interact. Seriously, it’s just not worth it.
To Ken … I’m not sure where you get your information but SABRE was a joint effort between IBM and American Airlines in the 60′s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system) and has been constantly updated along with IBM’s enhancement of the z/TPF operating system. A small number of these updates includes the support of C, 64-bit architecture and native web services (in your terms GUI).
There have been GUI front-ends into SABRE for 20+ years (remember EASY SABRE for consumers) that have long since replaced the traditional 3270 ‘green screens’. Again, not sure where you got your information about GUI.
Finally, I have written thousands of lines of TPF (z/TPF) code for Sabre, Cowboy, SystemOne, Deltamatic, PARS and in working on off these systems I don’t know of any process that requires 74-steps. If it took that many steps to (even in the old ‘green-screen’) no PAX would ever be accommodated.
Do you realize how many systems were affected and the amount of data converted (e.g. PNR’s, Pricing, Inventory, Flight Management, etc)? Whether an airline is converting to SABRE or some other CSS there’s going to be some problems from and conversion of this size.
Ken: I think you will also be interested in this post http://www.tnooz.com/2010/02/05/news/jilted-by-jetblue-for-sabre-navitaire-strikes-back/ It provides Navitaire’s perpsective on the JetBlue cutover to Sabre.
I don’t know anything about the Interact program. I do know that migrations to new host systems are massive undertakings and very complex.
JetBlue seems to have done a lot better with it than WestJet did.