WestJet "Passenger Perks" - Sabre Cutover, We Request your Patience

Hello Everyone.

I am not an official spokesperson for WestJet, I am solely a flight attendant. I cannot speak FOR the company and I do not have any insider details, I am out on the line and I see diectly how operations are affected by numerous differet things. I write this in regards to my own observations and feelings.

We would like to request your patience in respect to the Sabre change over. We understand it may be frustrating with long lineups, delays and misinformation. As with the implementation of any new system there are bound to be hiccups and things might happen unexpectedly.

We as a team are trying are working as hard as we can to keep flights on time, and to get everyone from point A to point B as quickly and as painlessly as possible. We have had head count discrepancies (how many people are on board) that have had us to rectify this by going through the cabin counting how many Men, Women and Children are on board in any given section.

Just this morning our call centre received over 500 phonecalls, this has pushed back wait times on the phone and occasionally caused our 1-800 number to block additional incomming calls by requesting people call back later.

Additionally, the WestJet.com website is also experiencing issues as well.

I ask, please that you keep your chins up and a smile on your face, arrive at the airport extra early and be just a little extra patient. This will help everyone provide a world class experience for you and help everything get done just a little bit faster! :D

Once the new system is fully functional, and once the kinks have been worked out the change WILL be for the better!

Don't worry.

I flew the morning that AC implemented the RESIII system.
The airport was a zoo as agents tried to check in people.

I really felt sorry for the check in agents who were just trying to do their best with a new system and new quirks.

That too shall pass....

We had purchased the Westjet Corridor Travel Pass. When we could even get a phone line, and not a busy signal, the estimated wait-time was over an hour. Completely unacceptable. Four pax wanted to depart today...that's 8 coupons to be used up. Instead, they went to YTZ on Porter. If, at the end of the year, we still have unused coupons which would have been used up during this fiasco of a switchover, I will count on Gregg Saretsky to do the right thing and extend their validity -- as he came through when, at CP, they ran an ad which showed 2 Business Class seats without "Canadian Business Class" erased in order to promote a 2-for-1 sale fare but which didn't apply to the J cabin...my 2-for-1 Y seats were accepted to be upgraded to J...and the ad agency lost the contract shortly thereafter.

One reason the wait times are so high are that people are calling in for every little thing.

If you have questions or concerns about your bookings, and if it is not for travel withint the next 24 hours, please refrain from calling the call centre.

Also, if it is of minor importance, please also refrain from calling the call centre.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/WestJet+phone+lines+jammed+after+technical+glitch+ takes+website/2120728/story.html

CALGARY - WestJet Airlines Ltd.’s website was plagued by technical difficulties for about three hours Monday, after the completion of an upgrade to its reservation system was followed by an unexpected outage at its new system provider.

Sabre’s web interface went down early Monday, WestJet officials said, leaving the Calgary-based airline’s new website largely inoperable and its customers dialing up the call centre to book flights.

One reason the wait times are so high are that people are calling in for every little thing.

If you have questions or concerns about your bookings, and if it is not for travel withint the next 24 hours, please refrain from calling the call centre.

Also, if it is of minor importance, please also refrain from calling the call centre.

Aww, but I thought Westjetters cared oh so much, 'cause they're owners. :rolleyes:

Aww, but I thought Westjetters cared oh so much, 'cause they're owners. :rolleyes:

Caring envy? Not hard to tell who you fly. :p

Hello Everyone.

I am not an official spokesperson for WestJet, I am solely a flight attendant. I cannot speak FOR the company and I do not have any insider details, I am out on the line and I see diectly how operations are affected by numerous differet things. I write this in regards to my own observations and feelings.

We would like to request your patience in respect to the Sabre change over. We understand it may be frustrating with long lineups, delays and misinformation. As with the implementation of any new system there are bound to be hiccups and things might happen unexpectedly.

We as a team are trying are working as hard as we can to keep flights on time, and to get everyone from point A to point B as quickly and as painlessly as possible. We have had head count discrepancies (how many people are on board) that have had us to rectify this by going through the cabin counting how many Men, Women and Children are on board in any given section.

Just this morning our call centre received over 500 phonecalls, this has pushed back wait times on the phone and occasionally caused our 1-800 number to block additional incomming calls by requesting people call back later.

Additionally, the WestJet.com website is also experiencing issues as well.

I ask, please that you keep your chins up and a smile on your face, arrive at the airport extra early and be just a little extra patient. This will help everyone provide a world class experience for you and help everything get done just a little bit faster! :D

Once the new system is fully functional, and once the kinks have been worked out the change WILL be for the better!


Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand why changing a reservation system would have so many problems with operations (flights)? Family function this weekend in Comox and a few where on westjet flights coming in, all late, some more than others. Additionally, while I was at YVR/YYC over the last few days I noticed WestJet departures where mostly late too.

I can understand the issues with the website and call centre due to the switch-over but why is this having such impact on flights being able to depart on time?

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand why changing a reservation system would have so many problems with operations (flights)? Family function this weekend in Comox and a few where on westjet flights coming in, all late, some more than others. Additionally, while I was at YVR/YYC over the last few days I noticed WestJet departures where mostly late too.

I can understand the issues with the website and call centre due to the switch-over but why is this having such impact on flights being able to depart on time?

The reason this is happening is due to the reservation system issues. This has been causing Flight Plans to be delayed or even entire flights worth of boarding passes to get messed up and have to be checked one-by-one.

The first day we were late due to 3 no-show guests. The CSA didn't know there were no-shows and we kept counting 3-less on board than operations said we were supposed to have, so we had to do a cabin breakdown (men, women and children in each of 3 sections of the aircraft) Still didnt resolve the issue until a lady got my attention and asked if we were going to leave without her son, his wife and their friend.... BANG! There we go, 3 missing people and that cleared everything up. We left 35 minutes late.

Yesterday through Halifax the CSA's told me that somethign messed up wit hthe seat map and they had to manually check off every single boarding pass against the system to make sure all the seats were accurate.

Also, as it is a new program and everyone HAS been trained on it, it still takes a little time for the Gate Agents to get used to the new system. Same for us, the FA's we have a new manifest system now that we have to sift through and decypher whos' who in the zoo! :P

Also when the reservatin system goes down, employees arent able to access the info they need to properly open/board/close flights so it has to be done manually.

..... Aaaaand as for the comment about caring... Yes, we do care VERY MUCH! But, the reason I said that is... We want to get our guests taken care of as fast and as friendly as possible. When you have 500 people calling in in just 4 hours and most of it is nonsensical questions and just general questions not pertaining to any flights that are imminent it puts the agents in the call centre in a position of not being able to help those guests who have imminent travel issues. I know of a coupple people who missed a flight altogether because they couldnt get thru to the call centre.

So it is just helpful to everyone to be patient with the website and with the call centre and if it's not life or death you book your flight for anything over a week from now... the flights will still be there in a coupple days. It's not that I am trying to be unfriendly I'm just trying to help others understand how much pressure just one phonecall less will take off of our agents.

One reason the wait times are so high are that people are calling in for every little thing.

If you have questions or concerns about your bookings, and if it is not for travel withint the next 24 hours, please refrain from calling the call centre.

Also, if it is of minor importance, please also refrain from calling the call centre.

So long as you can blame your customers for your problems... sure, stuff goes wrong, it happens, but I am sure that your management wouldn't be happy to see you blaming customers for perpetuating problems with a systems implementation.

So long as you can blame your customers for your problems... sure, stuff goes wrong, it happens, but I am sure that your management wouldn't be happy to see you blaming customers for perpetuating problems with a systems implementation.

I'm not blaming ANYBODY for ANYTHING firstly, so i would appreciate it if you did not put words in my mouth.



FURTHERMORE:
CALGARY - WestJet Airlines Ltd.’s website was plagued by technical difficulties for about three hours Monday, after the completion of an upgrade to its reservation system was followed by an unexpected outage at its new system provider.

Sabre’s web interface went down early Monday, WestJet officials said, leaving the Calgary-based airline’s new website largely inoperable and its customers dialing up the call centre to book flights.

That led to jammed phone lines and long waits on hold.

“Of course when the web goes down, people are going to turn to the call centre and that’s why we were for a brief period this morning getting swamped there,” said Richard Bartrem, WestJet’s vice-president of culture and communications.

The Sabre outage occurred around 10 a.m. Monday, a complicating factor as WestJet was already working through glitches arising from the switchover to the new SabreSonic reservation system early Saturday.

There were no flight cancellations over the weekend due to the Sabre rollout but there were delays which averaged about 45 minutes, Bartrem said.

At the Calgary International, baggage tag printers at some kiosks stopped working on Saturday.

In other instances, pre-reserved seat information from the old reservation system didn’t fully migrate to the new environment, so when customers checked in their seat selection, for instance, wasn’t there.

WestJet employees were also unable to access some data required to do bookings.

Catherine Dyer, WestJet’s vice-president, distribution, said hiccups like these are to be expected when such complex transfers occur.

Dyer said WestJet has undergone a systems upgrade, a web upgrade and a technology platform upgrade that saw more than 844,000 records migrated from the old system to the new SabreSonic reservation system.

“When you do something to that magnitude, it’s absolutely expected that there’s going to be things that don’t perform the way you expect them to when you go into production,” she said.

Independent airlines analyst Rick Erickson called the Sabre outage unfortunate.

“Typically they work around this, They (WestJet) may lose a few customers who want to book right now, but these things tend to right themselves,” he said.

By early afternoon, Sabre spokesperson Nancy St. Pierre confirmed the system was working and bookings were coming in through WestJet’s website.


gteel@theherald.canwest.com

Moderator, can you please migrate the two Sabre related threads? Thanks!

One reason the wait times are so high are that people are calling in for every little thing.

If you have questions or concerns about your bookings, and if it is not for travel withint the next 24 hours, please refrain from calling the call centre.

Also, if it is of minor importance, please also refrain from calling the call centre.

Sure you are blaming your customers. If your system cannot handle people calling in "for every little thing" (do you think they call your phone lines for kicks?) and you say this is a "reason" for slow service/phone issues, then you are blaming your customers for your problems.

You don't do your company justice with your attitude on the forum. If you identify yourself as a WS employee on the forum, don't forget that everything you write reflects on your company.

I have a feeling there are people here who have absolutely no idea how complex it must be to changeover from one system that handles all the automated functions of an airline to another. I doubt it's just reservations. It probably includes all backend operations AND accounting.

I expect it is a little more complicated than switching over from XP to Vista by inserting a CD into a disk drive!!!

Besides, I always read here about how people want Westjet to become a "real" airline, whatever that is.

I expect the switch to Sabre will allow Westjet to do a lot of things that the criticizers have been moaning about for years, yet the moment WJ does it, they moan about how inconvenieinced they've been!!

I guess you can't please everyone all the time!!!

Sure you are blaming your customers. If your system cannot handle people calling in "for every little thing" (do you think they call your phone lines for kicks?) and you say this is a "reason" for slow service/phone issues, then you are blaming your customers for your problems.

You don't do your company justice with your attitude on the forum. If you identify yourself as a WS employee on the forum, don't forget that everything you write reflects on your company.

I agree, the OP is not helping Westjet's reputation.

Similarly:

"I ask, please that you keep your chins up and a smile on your face, arrive at the airport extra early and be just a little extra patient. This will help everyone provide a world class experience for you and help everything get done just a little bit faster! "

Again suggesting how the customer should behave rather than how the Westjet agents should behave. Shows why the OP isn't in the PR dept. Of course, AC's PR people usually make the situation even worse.

Of course, AC's PR people usually make the situation even worse.

I think one of the things the WS experience shows is that when you get into complex scenarios like this there is little anticipating how easily things can get messed up and how hard it is to rectify them on the fly. Knowing how WS operates, one has the expectation that they will ace all logistical matters (WS is very good at logistics), so when those high expectations are not met then people will comment.

I haven't flown WS in the last week or so so I haven't anything to complain about in any case. I maintain a simple website for my own small company and have an idea of how complicated easy things can get as I have experienced it first hand. However, I don't blame my customers for bothering me when my website won't let them complete a transaction or login, etc. I just suck it up even when I think the customer is being very unreasonable.

I actually like the new website. It looks much more professional.

After being in SFO in line for over an hour to check a bag on Sunday and having them hand write bag tags and boarding passes I thought I was back in the dark ages. Seats were also assigned by stickers as they had no advance seat info. There were some unhappy campers that had paid extra for seat assignments in advance that did not get them. The F/A's had to count on board over and over the M/W/C numbers by section. Then we were further delayed as the computer could not do the weight and balance and they had to wait for it to be "phoned" in. We were over 1.5 hours late. Can't understand why they just did not comp a round of drinks as most pax nerves were fried after all this and people were fretting about connections. From YYC to YEG when we showed the gate agents the hand written bp's to get our seats they could not believe it. That flight was over 1 hour late.

Today we were .5 hours late from YEG to YYC but we were able have modern bp's and tags at the counter. We did make our connection only because the flight to SFO was late by an hour.

I did have to call to reservations number on Saturday as the system could not find my res. I was afraid it was cancelled. This is when I found out about the cut over. That as almost an hour queue. The problem was because my old res had numbers in it. It did finally let me check once I had the new res number but the BP's had red X on them so they were kinda useless. Yesterday I could check in online but the BP's came out as a blank square.

Once we were in the air all was fine but I wish they were a little more forth coming with the info.

I thought I would give WestJet a try.

I made a booking this afternoon for my family to travel from YYC to YVR in Feb, 2010-I think!

I tried to make the booking via the website, but kept getting error messages-so I called an agent.

I had the sense that the agent was not very familiar with the new system and I felt like we were walking though the booking process together step by step.

The agent gave me a locator number, but I can't pull it up on the website and I didn't receive an email confirming my booking.

Now, the wait to talk to an agent is 1 hr +.

I guess I will leave it and talk to Westjet when they sort things out.

Any suggestions? Can I pull up the booking on another site-tried both the Sabre and Galileo sites-check your trip, virtually there, etc.

Thanks.

if you go to virtually there website you should be able to pull it up with your locater and name