Passengers of Qantas and Virgin America had difficulties checking in this weekend after the system supporting both airlines experienced problems.
The Amadeus ALTEA platform went awry briefly on Sunday morning, causing queues for Qantas passengers trying to check in for flights around the worldwide.
The outage also hit passengers on Virgin Australia’s international flights.
It is the second time in the space of six months that Qantas has been on the receiving end of technical problems after a widespread incident in January this year with ALTEA system.
In a statement, Amadeus confirms the problems with the ALTEA system and says it is investigating the cause of the crash and will “take any appropriate steps to avoid this reoccurring”.
In an unrelated incident, Room 77 was one of a number of websites across many industries on the receiving end of problems which hit Amazon-owned cloud-hosting services.
The hotel search service, alongside other web brands such as Pinterest and Netflix, was taken out when a powerful electrical storm affected a data centre belonging to Amazon in the Washington DC area of the US.
A Room 77 statement says:
“We are taking several measures to ensure that this does not happen again. For example, we will be investing in greater data center redundancy across geographical regions, improving monitoring and alert systems, and providing better customer support.”
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About Kevin May
Good lesson for travel startups here. Don’t scrimp on redundancy plans. The amount of well funded startups who were hit by the AWS outage is incredible. Hence why the travel-majors have massive hosting environments in hub data centres and then DR alternatives elsewhere (as well as some apps in the cloud now). Ops is a hugely important piece of the puzzle and my advice to any travel startup would be to hire someone from an online travel-major who’s been dealing with this stuff for years. Your customers loyalty can be tested after just a few outages…
Steve, not quite sure what you mean – are you suggesting that Amadeus is a ‘startup’? It is one of the largest travel systems in the world. The problem seems to be the migration from their old mainframes to the new Altea system introduced this problem. Of course Sabre and Travelport didn’t have this problem with the old iron they use. They don’t get much bigger as an online travel-major than Amadeus.
Paul, no was referring to the startups who all suffered due to AWS downtime. But also more generally that there are well-funded travel startups with zero DR plans and very poorly setup network infrastructures. They are the ones who can learn some lessons from the likes of the travel-major OTA’s (who are extremely experienced in data centre setup, DR etc).