aerobod

From a business cost perspective it has never been very efficient having employees vs contractors in airports that can't sustain more than one flight per hour through most of the day. The contract ground handling companies in a given airport are able to more easily smooth the work flow due to handling multiple airlines. I'm sure the Pandemic forced WestJet to re-evaluate all aspects of operations, leading to the conclusion that the only airports it could efficiently operate with it's own staff are the 4 major ones, with YVR and YEG typically operating 60 flights a day and YYC and YYZ 120 flights a day, pre-Pandemic.

Sopwith

The people running the ops centre behind the scenes should be required to spend one week a year as customer-facing gate agents during a major weather event.

aerobod

I'm sure many do, even as an IT Director, I would spend time working with frontline staff several times a year before I retired from the company in 2018. Before the Pandemic, of the 120 or so senior people in the company (Director and above), each one had assignments to frontline staff environments such as one or more airports, flight attendants, pilots, TAC, Air Supply, Maintenance, etc, to ensure all staff away from the YYC head office building had a senior go-to person to contact directly if they wanted to, within the restrictions imposed by union agreements.

In the past I spent several days at YQU when the rollout of bag charges was implemented, dealing with guest complaints directly, held quarterly "ask me anything" sessions during team meetings with the shift teams at YUL and helped look at internal career moves for YYC Air Supply staff when the service was out-sourced. I also presented at the new hire classes twice a year, among many direct interactions with staff outside of my management area. From what I know from friends and colleagues still at WS, besides issues due to the Pandemic, senior management interaction with frontline staff is still a priority under Onex ownership.

All office staff were encouraged to volunteer each year over Christmas to keep things running smoothly in the YYC airport, as office staff we would take a team down for 4 hour stints at peak times, when other work was quiet in the office.

Fiordland

If the contract service is basically shrugging there shoulders and telling passengers to call into the call center to find out what is happening with the flight they are working the gate and onward connections there is a problem. Either in training, the level of empowerment or communication with who ever is dispatching the flight.

Yes, I know this is not a WestJet specific problem. I have been at Lufthans outstation where I go up with an agent asking to change the seat on what the kiosk assigned am told it can't be done at that station. The odd Air Canada out station where the normal response to any request is it will have to be handled with I get to the hub.

arf04

I don’t disagree with any of what you’ve written, but it seems that you, like me, have flown lots and are probably better able sit back and go with the flow when such things happen. Sure, it’s frustrating, but nothing changes by getting upset and yelling at people even if our anger is justifiable. I have flown about 25 segments this year since I started flying again and my experience is that I have never heard so much meaning and groaning from fellow passengers. I also witnessed one very unreasonable 60-ish man who was giving a GA at YYC a piece of his mind to the point where the police were called. It was ridiculous, especially as his gripe was totally not about anything the GA had done (or not done).

And yes, whether contract staff or WestJet employees, staff need to be trained to minimally make regular announcements about things and also about what sources of info might be available about delays and such (even if they can’t officially say anything about what they find out). I recall a few years ago flying out of Fredericton and there were rolling delays. One of the CATSA employees was hanging around the gate area and she was looking up stuff on FlightAware and other similar sites. It turned out that she was going to have to stay until the last flight went out or was cancelled, and she was much more informed than the AC ground staff in terms of what was going on at YYZ. There was freezing rain so lots of aircraft holding to land, so everything was backed up. It was very helpful as I then knew for sure I’d miss my connection and booked myself a room for my late arrival.

Fiordland

I agree. This goes so much more easily when the gate agents are experience and empowered. Without making announcements a good gate agent should realize its going to keep getting delayed. Pull up who ever is making connections and can be rerouted one by one and make the adjustment. There are going to be a few people who come up and want to give up and just need to be rebooked onto another day or given a refund. They can slowly reduce the size of the problem they have to deal with. However it involves being able to override fees and penalties etc. I find that is the case with the older more experienced agents they know how to do the change and feel more comfortable doing it. Not so much with the contracted stations or newer staff.

I am staring to fly again. Still a fraction of pre-pandemic. I am also finding people are just in a bad mode. I think it is just all the extra stuff around flying during a pandemic.

hoipolloi

Looking at the inferior online self-serve options offered by Westjet when compared to other airlines, it does not seem to me that you accomplished much there as an IT Director.

aerobod

I don’t know what profession you are in, but you obviously have little knowledge of airline IT systems and for that matter any deep knowledge of IT in general, only being aware of the small tip of the iceberg needed to operate an airline that is passenger facing, not the other 95% of the thousands of systems and applications needed.

My teams accomplished lots that enabled IT to drive a profitable and safe operation year after year, including being in the centre of IT driven operations that took the airline from one of the least on time to best on time records in the industry.

From the IT data and systems architecture perspective, I have no problem in finding plenty of innovative solutions we drove in partnership with vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and others.

Error 601

That is harsh.

The company I left a year ago had amazing teams in development and infrastructure, but we were still subordinate to management and ownership goals that didn't set the priorities we would have independently. We wanted to get rid of ancient internal applications from the 1990s. Management just hears that we want to give an ERP vendor hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and make them learn something new.

arf04

Unwarranted. Aerobod shares interesting and valuable insight from a former insider's perspective and doesn't deserve to be knocked for it. He has since, indeed, worked for another airline (as far as I recollect), so has good comparison. No need to get personal about your displeasure with WS.

Yes, it is fair to be critical of Westjet's IT, which really needs to be much better. My take on it is that senior management does not recognize the opportunity they have to be better than AC in the customer service department and that it will require significant investment in IT infrastructure and people to accomplish that.

From the outside looking in, it should be easy, but if you've ever worked on software and hardware development you would know that everything that seems like it should be easy turns out to have a series of unexpected problems associated with it. In my world, I have a couple of developers that work for me so I see firsthand what stuff crops up. For one of our applications, we switched hardware and software vendors. The new stuff needed to interface with our own custom programs and we were confident it would (and so, of course, was the vendor...), but it turns out that there is a glitch in the way our code deals with their code and it is taking lots of time to resolve between their team and our team. We ended up going back to our original vendor and buying more hardware and software to keep operations going, so a cost overrun, and we have invested too much valuable time working on the issue with the new stuff. It is frustrating, but it is what happens--and that is on a very, very small scale compared to an airline's needs.

hoipolloi

Alright. I take it back. My apologies aerobod !

aerobod

Apology accepted hoipolloi.

Well put.

The customer facing system decisions at WestJet while I was there always ended up being a bit short on ROI payback relative to the backend system investment. One example is the ROI on running 787s 16 hrs a day (that would be an industry record compared with a more normal 12 hours) was months, using IT analytics and realtime data collection from the aircraft in flight to allow pre-emptive maintanance. On the other hand most self-service customer options have paybacks measured in years. Bearing in mind that a self-service option aimed at business customers would only hit 20% of the people that the same option on Air Canada would (based on available business seat miles), but would cost the same amount to develop, so what would have a payback in 1 year at AC could be 5 years at WS. If you look at self-serve investment at WS, it is all about the operation efficiency at airports, with flow-through check-in, bag self-tagging and bag drop, this is due to the demographics of customers still being business-traveller light.

Perhaps the new CEO will find ways to fund more customer front-end automation or just decide that the company will eat the cost without a suitable business case (with Onex approval), but in the past even though Gregg and Ed wanted to see more front-end automation, they still had to keep within the corporate wide approval process and board approved funding bucket that typically saw 50-75% of project requests from the Business (such as Loyalty, Sales and Marketing depts) being sidelined due to higher priority and ROI projects from the Operations area. This pragmatism in the past has given WS a cost base 20% or so lower than AC, enabling more profitable operation, but who knows what the rejigging Onex will want to see once things stabilise again post-Pandemic.

Fiordland

I would agree.

As a passenger and as someone with a vendor who sells their software into large scale retail and logistics. These systems are extremely complex to get correct with a lot of moving parts are ties in to other partners. There have been no shortage of attempts to redo airline reservation systems that have been canned after spending north of $100M. Looking from the outside what WestJet has is not bad.

Most of the problems with WestJet at this point come from their incomplete transition from a low cost airline into a full service airline. They are in this weird situation where they have not quite figured all that out yet and there are lots of partially implemented things.

Symmetre

This would be money well spent, IMHO.

Today I'm trying to cancel an early January trip to the US. WS won't let me do it online, so I now have to call in to speak with an agent. Yet due to high call volumes, I can't get through. I'm told to call back when I'm within 72 hours of departure - thereby further contributing to the problem of high call volumes. All of this could be avoided if I were able to cancel the trip online and dump the fare back into my travel bank, so yes, further investment in customer-facing automation would be worth exploring.

cedric

I'm sure they will make accommodations as reflected in their contract of carriage and applicable laws.
I'm not sure why they would specifically feel it necessary to call that out.