Sky Assist Conferences

Air France / KLM in production
Air France and KLM, major European airlines part of the Air France / KLM holding, have jointly selected the BagAssist product implementation in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle and Amsterdam Schipol airports.

This strategic choice will support Air France and KLM to strengthen their active role in solving baggage incident in a quick and professional way. The production cut-over in Paris successfully completed on target for Air France, the cut-over for KLM completed shortly after.

Air France and KLM went one step forward compared to existing BagAssist customers by implementing new high-productivity interfaces to automatically retrieve passenger full contact (for frequent flyer passenger) and complete routing based on baggage tag number. The automation of major functions processing and avoidance of multiple data entries are integral part of BagAssist productivity and quality increase.
For the complete press release, click here.

4th BagAssist user conference (April 24-25, 2007)
The 4th BagAssist user conference took place on April 24-25 2007 in Brussels.
The user conference was the unique platform made for all the BagAssist users not only to exchange their experience about the product but mainly to drive the product evolution direction according to their operational needs. At each edition, the community is growing and more people are present, which implies more experience and mature requirements injected in the product.

Like usual, the first day was dedicated to the presentation of the newly available release. During that day, prospects that had already a product presentation as a minimum were also invited, allowing them to speak in a relaxed way with the current BagAssist users.

Special attention was drawn on the Business to Passengers modules as described below, and on current Sky Assist partners with IER (including an airport kiosk in trial), Voxtron (with new AgenTel software capabilities for BagAssist) and IBS, our Indian development company. The second day was for the existing customers only, and was dedicated to discussions about the next release, based on requirements sent in advance by the users.

Business to Passenger modules
The 2 new Business to Passenger modules, given part of the baggage incident control to the passenger, are now ready to move further. The PaxAHL (self-declaration on a kiosk in airport arrival hall) is integrated with the kiosk IER918.

A kiosk will be present at the user conference for trial. Swissport will start kiosk implementation (first in Zurich) end of 2007. The PaxDelivery (static status of baggage incident, then self-preparation of the baggage delivery following all airline restrictions) will be presented in draft at the user conference for review. It should be available for all users by end June 2007.

Brussels Airlines started March 25th 2007
Virgin Express extended the operations to Brussels Airlines. The new airline made of SN Brussels Airlines and Virgin Express has started operating. Virgin Express has been a BagAssist customer since 1st January 2006.

BagAssist suite - "The professional solution that automates your work in the primary baggage handling and tracing processes.

BagAssist key benefits: -

• Fully covering and automating the primary tracing business process, from the passenger declaration to the delivery of his bag;
• Comprehensive user-friendly screens and professional output documents (passenger reports, baggage labels, for delivery companies), which results in:
• Increases the staff productivity and reduces the training needs
• Increased quality and professionalism towards the passenger and the handled airlines
• Professional approach in the collaboration with external contractors;
• Contains all necessary on-line information and related triggers.
  
  Some Key Performance Indicators (KPI): -
• Swissport: 11% reduction in time per file for whole AHL process, daily shift reduction from 3 to 2
• Flightcare: 20% productivity increase for incident declaration modules (AHL, DPR and OHD), 40% productivity increase for passenger call handling (IVR, TV), lost calls less than 5%.

The final words are best left to the users:
"Thank you to simplify our daily work", Swissport BSL "What a great system", Jet Aviation GVA
"Very good, the system is dynamic !", Swissport GVA "Every handler gets the personal attention"