Tech-enabled employee travel can boost airlines’ bottom lines

The current labor shortage is challenging nearly every industry across the globe, and the airline industry has been especially hard hit.

The number of air transportation job openings and shortage of workers in the United States is staggering, and it is profoundly impacting the consumer experience.

Alongside the challenges of an increasingly difficult environment for assisting and managing passengers, the pressure on airlines to retain and incentivize frontline personnel is enormous.

And the connection between happy, well-trained airline personnel and the satisfaction of the traveling public is undeniable.

On one level, hiring new cabin crews takes time as both pilots and flight attendants require extensive training. Hiring for other vacant positions such as IT, marketing and customer service agents competes directly with other industries hiring for similar roles. Generally speaking, airline employee salaries do not keep pace.

On another level, as in many other industries, employees are re-evaluating their lives and how their current job aligns with their overall well-being and happiness.

One thing we know for sure: The ability to travel free or at a low cost is a major incentive for airline employees to pursue careers in air travel, and remain with them for the long-term.

It is why an overwhelming number of airline associates get into the business in the first place.

The airlines call this “non-rev” travel: Providing the benefit of low-cost or no-cost travel to the employee, filling “empty seats” on flights, to promote job satisfaction. But it provides no revenue to the carriers themselves.

In all, more than 2.5 million people are currently employed by airlines globally, and combined they book millions of non-rev tickets annually, a huge volume of traffic that takes hundreds of thousands of staff hours to execute and service.

In a study of close to 1,500 airline employees set to be released later this month, more than 80% of airline employees said flight benefits are important or extremely important in their decision to work at their airline. Yet just 22% of airline employees would recommend their airline’s in-house travel solution to their colleagues and friends, showing room for dramatic improvement across the industry.

If airlines want to retain current and new employees, then the flight benefit programs offered need to match expectations.

Technology constraints

There is a huge disjunction between the value placed on non-rev travel by millions of airline employee travelers each year, and the ability of airline carriers to deliver it well. Often, airline employees are forced to use outdated, cumbersome technology and poorly designed websites and apps to book non-rev trips.

Typical issues with non-rev booking tools include lack of automation for basic booking features and the need to call to make a modification or request a refund. Many respondents said they were unable to correct errors themselves and had to endure long “fix it” calls to have corrections made.

There is also the complex technical challenge of effectively allocating positive-space seats, the seats actually available for the employee to use. This has always been a problem, but very few have been able to address the issue through innovation and technology.

Newer technology addresses the issue by enabling employees to book positive space travel at a discount compared to the price a general consumer would pay, solving the complex pricing constraints that make the process difficult.

Other innovations allow employees to easily find flights with the most available seats, functionality that eliminates the need for employees to search multiple destinations and dates and saves time and improves the overall travel experience.

It’s a huge irony that to date, advances in booking travel that make consumer journeys so easy have largely not been made available to airline employees themselves.

At a time when consumers, including airline employees, enjoy the delivery of goods and services via low-friction providers such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber, the reality of airline associates booking travel like we did in the 1990s – sometimes, even less efficiently – is simply unacceptable.

Impacting the bottom line

Current in-house technology for booking non-rev travel is cumbersome, costly and inefficient to operate. It relies too much on human intervention at a time when increased automation is seen as a key to realizing efficiencies and cost savings throughout the travel ecosystem.

Financially speaking, the total cost of each non-rev booking can be as high as $15, which includes the cost of reservation agent time, the cost of staff travel time required to complete the booking using inefficient technology and IT costs required to maintain the technology well.

Multiply the costs and inefficiencies by the millions of non-rev trips booked with airlines each year, and it’s easy to see how the waste adds up.

Newer technology for managing the process is available, and it’s increasingly being implemented by carriers around the world. It has the potential to produce a complete reinvention of the way airline associates search, book and track non-revenue travel, including substantial cost savings and waste reductions for airlines.

Satisfied employees, happier travelers

It’s a tough time in the airline industry in many ways. With the financial pressures, delivery disruptions and shifting consumer expectations airlines currently face, non-rev travel technology could seem like a “nice to have” fix rather than a “must have.”

This ignores the fact that employees are the backbone of consumer service delivery and remain the airlines’ first line of consumer-facing contact. Without happy airline employees, there will not be satisfied travelers – and unsatisfied travelers mean less revenue and less growth.

Today’s airline non-rev travel systems can continue to work as an impediment to the satisfaction of employees and ultimately, the traveling public, or become an important tool in the recruitment and retention of airline employees.

The choice belongs to the carriers.

The need to reinvent the process of non-rev travel is clear, and it begins with the underlying technology.