Air Asia established in 1993 with commenced operations in 1996. In 2001, Tune Air Sdn Bhd (Tony Fernandes’s company) purchased this airline from DRB-Hicom. AirAsia never look back after that. AirAsia’s first and main base is the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, while its secondary hubs are at Kota Kinabalu International Airport, Senai International Airport and Penang International Airport.
AirAsia is well known as Malaysian low cost airline and even Asia’a largest low fare, no frills airline. The airlines claims ‘No Admin Fee’, but has some fees for services which are free on other airlines.
AirAsia slogan is ‘Now Everyone Can Fly’
Being the home of AirAsia, the LCCT is the budget terminal in KLIA, opened on 23 March 2006. LCCT is said to be carried about 10 million passengers a year.
The AirAsia subsidiaries are the likes of Thai AirAsia, Indonesia AirAsia, VietJet AirAsia and AirAsia RedTix. Meanwhile, AirAsia associate companies are AirAsia X, Tune Hotel and Tune Money.
For more info about AirAsia you can visit in the company website on www.airasia.com
Information System Use by Air Asia
Information systems are implemented within an organization for the purpose of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of that organization. Capabilities of the information system and characteristics of the organization, its work system, its people, and its development and implementation methodologies together determine the extent to which that purpose is achieved. Air Asia has carry out three type of information system such as yield management system (YMS), customer reservation system (CRS), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This system make Air Asia more effective and efficiency and possibly able to reduce the cost and eliminated inefficiency in their business.
Yield Management System (YMS)
Yield management system as known revenue management system. It understands, anticipates, and reacts to the behaviour of customer to maximize revenues for the organization. In this system, Air Asia used it to takes into account the operating costs aids Air Asia to optimize price and allocate capacity to maximize expected revenues.
Air Asia has done two level of optimization that is Seat and Route. For seat is considered an opportunity to maximize revenue. Seats are available at various prices in different time. A reservation done at a later date will be charged more than the one done earlier for the same seat. Route is the adjustment of price through a demand when the demand is higher compared to other. The effective method however is to combine these two levels for all flights, all routes so that both the seat and the route are effectively priced for all the flights.
Air Asia can more understand the behaviour of customer and offering the effectives and efficiency strategy. It also can be allocate capacity to maximize the expected revenue. Air Asia can make efficiency to know their customer using IT technology with lowest cost by using this system.
Computer Reservation System (CRS)
It is an integrated web-enabled reservation and inventory system suite powered by Navitaire Open Skies technology that includes Internet; call center and airport departure control functionality. Centralized customer data is also maintained by Open Skied and this help Air Asia to track booking and schedule fight activities with real-time, on-demand reporting feature. An important feature is that Open Skies seamlessly integrates with the already implemented YMS so that the system can be used in unison for pricing and revenue maximization and driving down the cost of operation at the same time.
CRS enabled Air Asia to introduce the first ticket less travel option and also provide features such as advanced boarding passes in addition to online booking that enabled the growth of Air Asia as these features attracted customers that did not have the time for purchasing tickets from counters and coming in 1 hour early for securing a seat on the aircraft.
Enterprise Resource planning system (ERP)
Integrated ERP solution powered by Microsoft business solutions (MBS) on Microsoft technology platform which is implemented by Avanade consultants in MA 2005.
With the robust ERP technology platform, Air Asia is able to successfully maintain process integrity, red financial month-end closing processing time, speeds up reporting and data retrieval process.
Airline reservation system (ARS)
Airline reservation system (ARS) is a type of system also known as manufacturing management process. This system is used for supply chain planning in the sense that it uses information from ERP for planning and scheduling operations (Muzumdar, no date)[Online]. APS also can be used to tracks costs based on the activities in the production of manufactured goods. However, due ERP system does not provide for better supply chain management to analyses the flexibility and intelligence required implemented by AirAsia. AirAsia therefore use APS system helps to improve AirAsia’s strategic and operational performance, classifies and clusters orders from customer, and checks resources availability.
ARS is also part of the so-called passenger service systems (PSS), which are applications supporting the direct contact with the passenger.
The airline reservations system was[when?] one of the earliest changes to improve efficiency. ARS eventually evolved into the computer reservations system (CRS). A computer reservation system is used for the reservations of a particular airline and interfaces with a global distribution system (GDS) which supports travel agencies and other distribution channels in making reservations for most major airlines in a single system.
Why Air Asia changes to Amadeus???
- The booking process with Amadeus is up to five times faster than booking outside of the GDS.
- Partnership with Amadeus allows Air Asia to reach a broader sales channel.
- Mid and back-office integration and sales reporting: Air Asia flight bookings can now be fully integrated in travel agents’ internal reporting processes, allowing them to track their business performance automatically.
- Smooth and seamless availability with increased flexibility: With direct access to Air Asia’s inventory, Amadeus travel agents can view seats in real- time, make a booking using either the GUI (graphic user interface) or the ‘green screen’, and then issue an Air Asia ticket without needing to learn new system commands.
- Flight Information is shown alongside scheduled carriers’ flights.
- Ticketless Access is fully integrated into your Amadeus workflow with data hand-off to mid and back office systems.
- Real-time fares and available seat information are returned to Amadeus directly from the airline’s inventory system.
- Use familiar entries for availability and PNR creation with the addition of simple, specific entries common to all Ticketless Access carriers.
- At End of Transaction, the booking confirmation number is returned from the carrier’s system, including the airline Record Locator.
- Some Low Cost Carriers offer travel agents the facility to modify bookings made through Amadeus.
- No need to waste time searching different internet sites. Booking through Amadeus is proven to be faster.
- No manual duplication of effort.
- What a customer see is what they get. So no having to explain why the seats aren't available to disappointed customers.
- Minimal training is required, so they can started booking today.
- They customer’s booking is securely held in the airline system.
- Enabling them to offer excellent customer service and potentially increase revenues.
- Additional services can be booked eg Speedy Boarding, Baggage
Booking Airasia carriers through Amadeus Ticketless Access
Amadeus Ticketless Access
Amadeus Ticketless Access offers agents a full booking process for Low Cost Carries, seamlessly integrated with existing booking workflow. Flights are included in the familiar Amadeus main displays. A secondary display shows the last seat availability and associated fares. Booking AirAsia flights with your client's credit card or with an agency payment account is straight forward. Mild and Back Office reporting and accounting processes are also fully integrated and use the standard Amadeus Interface Record.
Amadeus Ticketless Access offers agents a full booking process for Low Cost Carries, seamlessly integrated with existing booking workflow. Flights are included in the familiar Amadeus main displays. A secondary display shows the last seat availability and associated fares. Booking AirAsia flights with your client's credit card or with an agency payment account is straight forward. Mild and Back Office reporting and accounting processes are also fully integrated and use the standard Amadeus Interface Record.