Innovative Travel Technology
American Airlines Case Study
American Airlines Streamlines Infrastructure and Rolls Out Improvements Faster with ITA's Boombox™American Airlines wanted to make their intuitive price and schedule matrix the default shopping path and find a faster way to implement new pricing and shopping functionality in step with changing market needs. ITA Software’s Boombox provided a solution.
Boombox is a comprehensive integration platform for airfare pricing and shopping systems. It provides a simple API and hosted service layer for QPX™ that allows pricing and shopping web apps like calendar and sellup grids to be implemented with ease. Once deployed, ITA technical engineers manage ongoing adjustments, allowing customers to make changes with minimal effort required by their employees and with significantly lower development and operating costs.
Every change to the system starts with American telling ITA what pricing and shopping functionality will appear in their user interface. ITA technical engineers then configure Boombox based on American’s business logic, summarizing and filtering results to quickly match the desired interface. As American's requirements evolve, ITA technical engineers use custom tools to keep the API up to date.
A consistent early adopter of new and innovative ITA technologies, it comes as no surprise that American Airlines was the first to deploy Boombox. In doing so, they accomplished both their goals. They made their intuitive price and schedule matrix the default shopping flow – and they established a much easier way to configure, test, and deploy changes and new features on www.aa.com. Additionally, because their shopping path is fully supported by the Boombox integration platform and team, American realized an immediate reduction in middleware and operational costs.
American found an innovative use of Boombox to more easily and quickly send targeted deal alerts to AAdvantage members. ITA technical engineers developed a custom API that optimizes and automates flight searches for abandoned shopping sessions. Queries are run during off hours when web traffic is lower, returning updated pricing for those exact searches as well as the best price/date to fly in the next 60 days. Results are further filtered to return only the information required for American’s marketing campaign – and in a format that is much easier to integrate with their customer relationship management and email management systems. This creative use of shopping query data is expected to improve customer loyalty and increase overall revenues.
With Boombox, American Airlines resources can now focus on application design and creating a better online experience for their customers, as opposed to integration details.
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About American Airlines | ||||||||
