Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan - Flight Status notifications

I just had some serious weather delays and cancellations heading through MSP at first on DL and then rerouted to DTW and then cancelled to the following day and so on and so on. The Delta app on the IPhone as well as text updates to my phone was fantastic. I received an alert that our gate changed before the Gate Agent found out and told the passengers over the PA. This happened twice. Alaska needs to take a look at Delta's IT systems for flight status and IPhone apps and copy them.

I gave up on flight alerts when they first came out as they were frankly unhelpful. I would be at the gate 30 minutes prior to departure, then 20, then 10, after which I would figure out we were probably going to be delayed (no announcement) then 5 when the announcement would come. 5 minutes after scheduled departure time my phone would vibrate with the text that the flight was delayed....duh. I found the alerts helpful if I was at a station like RDM as I would be notified the the incoming flight would be delayed. Of course that was only if I put the flight alert on that separate incoming aircraft and Flt #. I have found other travel apps more helpful.

Hopefully things have changed since that time as I haven't used flight alerts for awhile but if others in the industry have it right, it would be great if AS learned from them. It would be nice to have a text that your flight will be boarding in "x" minutes as you finish that last drink in the Boardroom.

At last week's Gold lunch in Seattle it was announced that there will soon be a lot of new smart phone notification features, starting with the iPhone. A lot of them have to do with upgrades and airport information but hopefully they will include enhancements regarding flight alerts. I know that there have been many comments on this forum about them - hopefully, AS has listened.

Alaska needs to take a look at Delta's IT systems for flight status and IPhone apps and copy them.

^^

Part of the problem, though, is that AS's back-end systems probably couldn't feed the necessary data to the flight status and iPhone app systems. Delta's fully automated Delta Nervous System pushes real-time messages throughout the entire Delta computer network, so all nodes know instantly when something happens. If a pilot writes up an inbound aircraft as needing maintenance, the system pushes notices about the potential delay to all departments--maintenance (so they can get the mechanics ready and on the way quicker), dispatch (so they can decide whether to substitute another aircraft), the gate operations center (so they can decide to move to another gate if necessary), and many more nodes.

At Alaska, if a plane is late, someone downstairs in the bowels of the airport has to notice that the aircraft is late on a monitor and then manually coordinate things. As a result, the systems are slow to update, which means that even the GAs often don't know what's going on with regards to delay times, much less the automated flight status systems.

AS has no problem sourcing out their reservations and airport systems (Sabre), so maybe they should look at sourcing the Delta Nervous System for operations.

At last week's Gold lunch in Seattle it was announced that there will soon be a lot of new smart phone notification features, starting with the iPhone.

Hurry up, AS! The current iPhone app is pretty solid, but there can most certainly be some improvements made.