Last weekend, Frontier ditched its fancy Sabre reservations system for a more basic and less expensive Navitaire system. This is helping the airline reduce costs so it can become an ultra low cost carrier. For the most part, I believe this went smoothly, but did anyone travel on Frontier while it was going on? Any problems?
13 comments on “Topic of the Week: Frontier’s Reservation System Switch”
Not so smooth according the Denver news:
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_27699629/frontier-airlines-new-system-causing-big-slow-down
Or the Cleveland news:
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/03/frontier_airlines_online_glitc.html
When will companies learn that trying to go super cheap isn’t always a good thing.
I call it the Wal*mart effect. People & businesses want to cut costs even if in the end it bites them in the but later.
Sabre is a POS and expensive. Cutovers are always tough unless you spend millions to derisk it.
agree with Sean. Navitare is cheap because it is more limited in functionality than Sabre, but it does not mean it is crap quality. If you never plan to exceed the flight cap or do heavy codesharing or set up complex routing rules, Navitare saves a bunch of money for a streamlined and simple carrier. Even the ticket stock it can use is ordinary retail receipt paper vs the heavy Sabre stock.
The new system lets you check in only 6 hours ahead of time. I’m traveling today and I was on it last friday and had a lot of problems pulling up the reservation on the website. Everything was sorted out when I got to the airport though!
Considering the relative lack of complexity and streamlining on the flight planning side as they pull down and re-align, it is likely that having a complex system is not useful. That said, I think their new website is pretty terrible, and clearly was not ready for release (there are obvious button glitches, sections missing that were on the old site, and generally looked unpolished).
My parents flew out of MCI on Frontier the first morning the new system went into effect. Despite extra staffing to handle the switch, they spent nearly an hour and a half waiting in line to check their bags. Tomorrow, they fly back out of PVR. Hopefully the situation has improved.
Could it possibly be any worse than the CO d.b.a. United debacle changing from FASTAIR (light years ahead) to CO’s SHARES ? What a clusterF.
Frontier is going down hill and that is a sad thing….they have no direction at all it seems…..
They’re making good money. After all those years of losses, that;s a pretty good direction.
“Bottom line is there was a transition, and continues to be in many areas, as the old Frontier was a money loser … PERIOD,” airline spokesman Todd Lehmacher wrote in an e-mail. “This has been the best technology cutover in the industry in the past decade — look to other high profile cutovers … and you will see that.”
Hah. F9’s VP of IT is the same guy that ran the B6 cutover. I wonder if he agrees with that statement.