At least 3 types of people here on AC FT, in terms of the Amadeus move.

Group 1: Uh oh, I've got AC flights booked on Nov 18 or 19. Should I run and hide? Cancel and book elsewhere?

Group 2: Oooooh, exciting. I'll book some Nov 18 or 19 flights and for fun, see what happens. Maybe get some codes and coupons if stuff breaks.

Group 3: Just added popcorn to the grocery list. Plan on watching from the comfort of home.

:D

This makes me wonder if AC choose to migrate now instead of putting it off till next year given the EU 261 style rules being introduced next month with the air passenger bill of rights:

I would imagine it would be hard to argue that an IT meltdown was outside their control or safety related.

If you choose the skunk (others call it the racoon or simply PD) realize that their route network is exceedingly thin and if you get IRROPs there chances are you will be spending some qwality time at the airport.

That raises an interesting question to what extent does the move to Amadeus impact StarNet? Will AC still be able to access that system and/or contact the operating carrier of the connecting flights to get that sorted?

A quick glimpse at the *A employee guide offers some ideas:

Here's to hoping AC has a pad of MCOs on D-Day ready to hand out so that IRROP passengers can go to the ticket desks of OALs to get something sorted.

Realistically, I think this will go smoothly. Name one major IT project AC has undertaken in the last 5 years that has been an unmitigated disaster? Sure AC has had minor hiccups such as with leap years but by and large it's been very minor issues all things considered. Meanwhile DL, AA and most notably British Airways have all had IT meltdowns during normal operations!

You forgot Group 4 (which includes me) : This is going to be such a nothing story, it will make on Halloween sound like headline news :p

Safe Travels,

James

Paper MCOs... that will be fun.

At least for US flights AC will be able to 240 pax with scrap paper!

I will be part of group 2 and 3. Flying from ORD on the 18th and there is popcorn right by the AC gates.

My experiences with COUPON REQUIRED have been much much much more challenging than you lead me to believe. The two instances that come to mind:

1. LGA GA+concierge couldn't resolve it, central concierge took an hour, I missed my flight
2. SFO concierge couldn't resolve it, notified YVR, who called me to ask if it had been resolved, and ended up sending a concierge to meet me on arrival with a FIM

I can't even imagine how this would work for a non-SE.

And the first situation there had a ticket that matched the PNR. The second was after a SDC.

OK, I'm going outside 5 years BUT, I'd suggest a major IT project is a "disaster" when it is cancelled prior to ever being made operational. From 2009:

"... Air Canada recorded an impairment charge of $68 million related to previously capitalized costs incurred in the development of a new reservation system.."

I think its going to be highly dependent on the exact person you get.

A 55yo GA with 30 years experience might be able to resolve it, directly, with a few keystrokes. Or issue a new ticket, and not GAF about the paperwork being right when the BSP does its thing. And a $15/hr YYZ concierge who knows how to do exactly the 13 things they were taught, without any understanding of what those even are, would be lost without an hour long phone call to the helpdesk.

OK Boomer. The fact of the matter is, yes the person you get will impact how IRROPs and service recovery is handled. In my (fortunately) limited experience of getting IRROP'd I don't see any correlation between age and experience and how well they handle the IRROP situation. Most recently, I mis-connected at YUL due to ATC issues. Head to customer service and the grey haired lady issued my boarding pass for the following day. When I inquired about hotel and meal voucher given I'm UA *G she in effect told me to pound sand. I then went to MLL and the friendly agent in their mid to late 20s correctly agreed with me that I'm entitled to this duty of care and steered me to ticketing which could actually issue the compensation. I head to ticketing and this lovely lady in her 30s issued me that compensation.

The problem with the concierges and customer service has nothing to do with their age or lack of experience and everything to do with the training program (or lack there of) that
the company has instituted. I'm 31 and probably know more than most people sitting behind the desk when it comes to *A policies because I took the time to read the manual carefully and understand how the policy and procedures work.

And how many passengers were impacted by this IT project? Zero based on what you've said. AC is more conservative (to a fault perhaps) when it comes to rolling out new IT systems and suspect it will be no different with this one. They will certainly have contingencies on hand.


Safe Travels,

James

I'd have to be 20 years older to be a Boomer

I'm too old to say "ok boomer".

And I'm younger than j2simpso.

I will go a couple steps further. IGS has been a disaster for AC that has happened so slowly most everyone misses it. Terrible value, very slow to deploy, buggy, failure prone IT. The only way you could not see it as a disaster is if you don’t think IT and data are mission critical and a core competency for AC. But it is no stretch to image that all those things have had real and opportunity costs greater than the $68m from that one obvious disaster.

I 100% legit stopped reading after "ok boomer".

My suggestion is that the younger ones don't know how to do obscure things, not that they don't want too. We don't have enough information to know if your blue hair had the ability. I'll grant they did not GAF.

In Cow's situation, the Concierge wanted to help, and was on the phone for an hour actually helping.

In terms of the daily ops - you shouldn't see any impact at the airport initially. This is because the DCS is not transferring at the same time. DCS can integrate pretty well with any Reservations database and thus it should basically be seamless.

I would expect that there is a shadow in Amadeus already for all RES III bookings - thus the transition will be smooth.

Where you will see real issues is for calling reservations and needing to get anything done that is more than basic. They will have a hard time with changes to itineraries, ticket exchanges, repricing, etc. This will also creat big backup in the call centres and so unless you are SE - expect the call centres to be completely overwhelmed . . because everything will just take longer.

I think I heard that DCS will also move in stages based on location. Some international locations won't change for a few months. Given that DCS can talk to any other DCS - this is not such a big deal either.

Every passenger that has had to wait an additional 10 years for a full-blown update of the AC systems to be implemented and has had to suffer through numerous IT faults and clunky, frequently-down (for a 24/7 airline) systems that don't play well with each other and often their airline partners systems.

Yes, AC has had few total IT disasters but they have effectively created many call-centre disasters by the lack of online capabilities to handle what many of their competitors can do online. The failure to manage and implement IT modernization isn't conservatism (i.e. appropriate risk management) but is merely applying bandages to an every increasingly complex and aging monster.

Anyone remember Polaris ? AC has been trying forever to replace RES 3

https://atwonline.com/operations/air...vations-system

Of course. Note however with the previous project, AC was using a vendor who had no real experience with full fledged airline reservations and departure control systems with a major carrier. Name me one major airline that actually has ITA Software as their actual reservations and departure control system! They may have however fare and flight availability search modules from ITA that work in conjunction with their existing reservations system.

AC and ITA were just overly ambitious in trying to develop a new and revolutionary reservation and departure control system from scratch and at the same time trying to defy the traditional paradigms of most legacy systems in the market place. As such the by project failed.

This time they are using Amadeus, an out of the box legacy system but with many improvements that have been a proven solution already in use by most of AC’s Star Alliance partners.

I think many people on this forum would consider Polaris to be a major success from an IT standpoint. Not a single passenger was impacted by the rollout of the system.

One thing I forgot to ask is how the Amadeus rollout would impact flights booked with érrorPlan that are solely partner operated flights. I've got an érrorPlan booking for myself and my parents for January that is all on UA metal and has a UA booking code. If Amadeus goes sideways would that impact the ticket or that I should be worried about?

-James

As long as the reservation is showing and the e-ticket number is attached to the segments on UA's side, there is nothing to worry about. Note that the e-tickets are stored in a separate e-ticket database that isn't really part of the main AC reservation system.

Just don't make any changes after the migration (or be very cautious afterwards) and you should be fine. If you need to make any changes, try to do so before the migration.

There's a chance that after the RES III PNR is migrated over to a new Amadeus PNR, that the original "link" between the UA segment in the RES III PNR and the actual live segment in UA's SHARES PNR is "severed" and not properly "reconnected" to the migrated segment in the Amadeus PNR (perhaps due to teletype failure during the "data merge" process etc).

If making a change and the original the UA segment is "cancelled" and rebooked into a new UA flight in Amadeus after the migration, there is a chance that the original UA segment in UA's SHARES PNR would remain uncancelled (due to severed link) and show along with the newly rebooked segment. This would result in a "duplicate booking" on UA's side while everything looks fine in Amadeus (with only the new segment showing). The errorplan agents would then keep insisting that everything is fine while UA would say that you have a duplicate booking.

Success? Rollout? Polaris was abandoned before it ever went into use and AC swallowed a big loss in the process. More here.

If that's the case, maybe they will treat all old RESIII PNRs like TA/OAL GDS bookings and just do a shadow ONR with IX messages? 🤷.♂️

My recent experience was painful, but I had an A-Team customer service desk sort it out after two hours with the assistance of ticketing/NRD.

Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus
Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus
Amadeus, Amadeus, oh, oh, oh Amadeus
Come and rock me, Amadeus

Luckily for me my flights that week are morning of 18th and afternoon of 22nd. I will just miss whatever stupidity unfolds on the 19th.

And my argument is the younger ones don’t know all the rules making it easier for us elites to pull the wool over their eyes :p

One follow up question: what would happen for aUA award ticket containing solely an AC flight particularly in the event of IRROPs ? Again I’ve got UA and AC PNRs? Granted these flights are in January but in case all the doom and gloomers are correct.

The transition starts on the 18th. I purposely booked my flights for that week to see what breaks the system.

During the migration (assuming things go the way they should), the "received from" field (or similar field which would indicate that the booking originated from UA and the UA PNR and Office ID/Pseudo City Code) from the RES III PNR would get copied over to a similar field in the Amadeus PNR.

Amadeus would then send an "update" to UA (based on the "received from" field data) with a messaging containing the new Amadeus Record Locator. Once this happens, any UA agent who pulls up the UA PNR would see the Amadeus record locator instead of the former AC record locator.

During IRROPs on AC's side, assuming the airport you are departing from has already migrated their DCS (Departure Control System) to Amadeus Altea, there is no need for the agent to update the reservation/PNR. You are simply "transferred" to another flight within the DCS with just a few mouse clicks in the Altea DCS interface. The under relying reservation remains untouched (this means you won't get rebooked to full "J" or "Y" as your original award booking class of "I" or "X" will show on the DCS side).

However, for airports not yet on Amadeus Altea DCS, you would need to be manually rebooked in Amadeus (reservations side) before you can be given a new boarding pass.

I have flights on the 17th, 18th and 19th... Should be fun times...

As long as you don't make any changes during those days (I believe AC is going to have a blackout period where you won't be able to make any new bookings or changes anyway), then you should be fine.

The "big migration" that everyone is talking about is only for the reservations side of things.

Airport operations (Departure Control System or DCS) will be migrated in batches (airport by airport on different days) to Altea Customer Management (name for the new DCS) and check-in will still be done using the old DCS (the only difference is that the "Additions and Deletions List" or ADL and "Passenger Names List" or PNL is being "uploaded" to the old DCS from Amadeus reservations as opposed to the old reservations system when check-in for a flight opens) until the airport is migrated.

12 hours blackout period is what I was told. I'm going to do a SDC at the airport to see if it's possible, or if it will break horribly.

I assume eups would be affected then?

I would assume that if your upgrade is not "confirmed" prior to the reservations "blackout" period, any further upgrade clearance would be done in the DCS at the airport once check-in opens.

12 hours of black out is a very very very long time for airport / reservations operations.

Are you sure it's confirmed for full 12h? I thought I read up thread it's scheduled for 2, but up to 12 allocated just in case.

12 hours of reservations potentially going to OALs is a lot of money.

Airport operations are unaffected.

For passengers who desperately need to travel last minute at the most expensive fare, they can always show up at the airport and fly as a "Go Show" (no reservation) passenger. They just get listed in DCS without a reservation. Whether AC will actually allow this is another story.

Is this the same as "GOSHO"? If so, I thought that was related to the flat tire rule. (I'm genuinely curious)

Yes. Gosho.

Sorry for triggering a few on here ! Haven't they been trying to replace RES 3 since the early 2000's ?

Yup :-)

I even remember sending a message (DM) on Twitter as a concerned passenger to the Amadeus asking their sales team to reach out to Air Canada a couple years ago!

The evening of the 18th, n’est ce pas? I’m flying in the morning.

If you want to look at it from a business project standpoint then sure it was a failure - money down the drain. On the other hand, it was possibly also a great low risk learning experience for the IT team on how not to do a roll out. In terms of operational impact, I can't see any. As far as I can tell no flights were impacted by this project.

Here's to hoping you luck into some IDB compensation and are rebooked into a generous fare code :p

Be careful what you wish for...you might actually get it! If someone could explain to me what prey tell is the issue with RES3 in general. Compared to the likes of other airline's IT systems it seems to be doing well. When was the last time RES3 fell over and left a group of travellers stranded? Sure the new Amadeus system may fix a couple shortcomings in the existing system but it may also break other things. Only time will tell...

Not likely if the airport you are departing from has also transitioned to Amadeus Altea Customer Management (the DCS side)! There's a built in feature called "Transfer" which is used to move passengers to another flight in IRROPs. The underlying reservation remains untouched in this process.

Note: LH uses the same system, and when upgrades are processed within the DCS, the new boarding pass still shows the original fare code (eg. Y, B, H, V, Q etc.) but with a new seat assignment in Business Class.