The Smartwings digital transformation that changed holiday travel

You’re flying off on holiday. At check-in you show your ID card or passport, and that’s it. It used to take manual work by five parties; today it is standard.

Five parties, five formats, hours of manual work

Some people can’t even remember paper tickets. On charter flights, passengers got an envelope from the tour operator’s rep - right at the airport, just before departure. Five parties were involved in the process: the tour operator, the airline, ground handling, catering and the passenger.

On top of that, every tour operator used its own booking system and sent the data in a different format - some in Excel, others in Word. Processing all that mixed data on the airline’s side took hours and was prone to human error.

Peak season was full of stress. Everything was entered by hand, passenger lists were re-typed for hours on end, and late changes arrived by email or text message, at night and at weekends too. So Smartwings decided to go through a digital transformation with us.

One system that connected everyone

For Smartwings we built a bespoke information system that connects the airline’s departments, the tour operators and the organisations working at the airport - ground handlers and catering suppliers. Instead of being re-keyed by hand, the data is now processed automatically, by machine.

a single format for transferring data from tour operators to the airline

a protocol for automatic imports of passengers and orders

a specialised solution for irregular ad hoc flights

a database of passengers, catering orders, baggage and other requests

passenger data sent to the check-in systems at the airport

standard and special orders aggregated and sent to suppliers after every change

advance seat allocation for tour operators

exports for accounting, and 24/7 support for the connected tour operators

‘Thanks to engine2, we have successfully gone through a digital transformation. The biggest benefit is lower costs and fewer errors, thanks to automation and machine processing.’

Petr Čeněk, Director Ground Operations, Smartwings

Fewer errors, lower costs, full scalability

The processes are now fully scalable. The airline can forecast and plan better, administrative costs have fallen dramatically and errors have all but disappeared. What the transformation delivered:

a single data format across all tour operators and departments

machine processing instead of manual re-keying and late-night phone calls

automatic weight and balance calculation to save fuel

easy scaling without having to hire administrative staff

an auditable, traceable process across five parties

smooth passenger check-in, several times faster

‘The new system saves us a lot of work and time. I know all the details are correct, and nobody is going to ring me at the weekend because they forgot to report something.’

Jitka, tour operator manager

How the transformation helped each party

Tour operator: no more manual re-keying and late-night calls

Tour operator staff now enter and check the passengers on each flight themselves. A request for a vegetarian meal only has to go into the system, and the order reaches the catering supplier automatically. Gone are the night-time and weekend calls from check-in desks, and the thousands of envelopes of paper tickets.

Catering: orders handled automatically, without errors

Orders used to be emailed through several departments, and last-minute sales were handled by hand, weekends included. Today it is all fully automatic - from the tour operator through the airline to catering, including the records for accounting. Catering companies can also pull the data through an API.

Handling: smooth check-in and capacity planning

The ground handling company mainly needs to know the number of passengers in order to plan the number of desks and shifts. With our system it has that information in advance and can plan capacity more easily. The passenger arrives at check-in, proves their identity - and is checked in several times faster.

Say goodbye to needless paperwork

We’d be glad to build an application that pays off for you.