Airline Staff Travel Challenges : Solving with Automation

Airline Staﬀ Travel Challenges:
Solving them with automation
White Paper by: Nancy Elsa Job,
Business Analyst, iFly Sta Lob, IBS Software Services

Introduction
Sta travel privileges are one of the charms of the airline industry. The lower pay in the
industry is often compensated by free or discounted travel options for employees and
their dependants. Industry practices and labour laws almost mandate such perks for
airline employees. However, sta travel management is one of hard-fought tasks in the
industry. Feedback from airlines reveals that management of sta travel is a pain area.

This white paper attempts to analyze some of the major challenges faced by airlines in
managing their airline sta travel requirements and possible ways to solve those
di culties. It also gives an outlook on making sta travel administration far easier by way
of automation, using new-generation IT systems.

IBS Software Services Pvt Ltd Airline Sta Travel Challenges: Solving them with automation 02

The airline sta travel challenge
As airlines start operations, the HR/sta travel team put in place a sta travel policy
taking into consideration the region of operations, type of service o ered and the
prevalent labour rules. Other parameters de ned in the policy are, years of service,
employee grade or designation, that determine the eligibility of employees to
free/discounted tickets (travel passes). Being an internal process, sta travel
management is done manually in most carriers. To avail the perk, the employee needs to
create a request, mostly paper forms, and forwards it to the sta travel department. The
sta travel administrator manually validates the employee and veri es the eligibility
from the records maintained by the sta travel o ce. The administrator then makes
bookings for the employees, processes payments, issues tickets, manages refunds if any
and requires to track these records. On a typical working day for a sta travel o cer who
works in a manual paper world, these tasks can be quali ed as challenges. While manual
processes may su ce for small or startup airlines with low employee strength, but as the
airline grows, managing sta travel becomes increasingly di cult.

Let us examine some of the challenges that airlines face in the management of their sta
travel and look at ways to overcome these challenges.

03 Airline Sta Travel Challenges: Solving them with automation IBS Software Services Pvt Ltd

Challenge 1:
Overheads due to high manpower requirement in sta travel
o ces and long cycle times – for identi cation & veri cation of employees,
managing travel requests, booking tickets and maintaining requisite records.
Studies reveal that for a 10,000 strong airline, a leisure or business travel request takes
hours or even days to get processed, if the airline follows a manual process. For each
request that moves to the sta travel department by means of an e-mail, fax or hard
copy, the administrator needs to identify the employee and ascertain his/her eligibility
from the employee records. This is a tedious task.

On a typical working day, the average number of travel requests to the sta travel
departments may be as many as 300 for a 10000 strong airline. Research shows that the
sta travel department takes around 3 hours to 1 day to manually process a single travel
request. And for a huge volume of requests the time taken and personnel e ort spend
for administration is de nitely very high.

Solution:
Current web-based applications available in the industry help airline employees make
their travel requests online from anywhere in the world. This eliminates the time to
queue in front of the sta travel department. Automating the complete sta travel
function in the airline, using these applications makes the processing of the request
simpler, foolproof and much faster. Employee information and validation can be rapidly
checked against HR data making the veri cation process fool proof and swift. The
approval and booking processes can be as simple as a mouse-click. Overall, the lead time
(from employee applying for travel, till issue of a ticket) can be reduced from days to a
few minutes.


Challenge 2:
Management of sta travel policies, allocation of concessions to
employees, and handling policy changes.
Changing labour/industrial laws, new business requirements, new statutes can call for a
change in sta travel policy. Deliberate misuse of the policy can also necessitate a policy
change. New travel concessions need to be distributed correctly, properly announced
and will need to be added to existing policies. Implementing all these changes in sta
travel policies are di cult when done manually. When a new employee joins, the travel
concessions have to be allocated to the employee based on his/her eligibility. Many
airlines do not allocate concessions to employee until they have served a stipulated
period with the company. Sta travel policies also comprise accrual of concessions based
on service length or calendar year. Correct allocation of travel passes to all eligible
employees thus becomes a problem that the sta travel department has to live with. This
problem becomes more complex when all concessions utilized by an employee have to
be tracked and account for the balance. This complex task is time consuming and prone
to error.

Solution:
Technology is now a key player in solving the issues of airline industry. Management of
sta travel policies can very easily be handled by an IT system that uses a “Rules Engines”
which can capture all complex policy requirements and convert them into rules that can
be tracked by the system. All the sta travel rules and regulations/stipulations can be
loaded on to the software system as a onetime process. Once this is done, concessions
can be allocated and distributed to employees and dependants based on the policy, with
minimal e ort. Accruals are automatically done based on the employee service length or
calendar year. This would mean that every employee’s concessions are recorded as it is
allocated and updated as and when it is used for travel. Airlines can also ne tune their
sta travel policies based on the system generated reports on sta travel patterns, which
can be easily communicated to the employees. Automation can also limit the fraud that
could happen in availing the employee concessions.


Challenge 3:
Decentralized sta travel o ces.
The airline may have a number of sta travel o ces located at di erent cities, worldwide.
In a manual mode, it is extremely di cult to have a control on these decentralized sta
travel o ces. Sta travel processes in these diverse o ces cannot be synchronized
resulting in loss of time, e ort and costs.

Solution:
A new-generation IT system can provide centralized administration for all the sta travel
o ces occuring worldwide. This means that the administration can be done from a
single point which re ects in all other o ces. This can result in signi cant reduction in
overheads for the airline.

Challenge 4:
Tracking utilization of concessions & management reports for
audit.
In a manual or semi automated process, it is very di cult to maintain accurate records of
all sta travel, which in turn makes it hard to get the right reports in time for audit.
Towards the end of each working day, the sta travel administrator has to send various
reports like reconciliation reports, daily sales volume reports and cancellation reports to
the Finance department and to the management. There can be situations like at the last
minute of the day before a vacation, the management asks for a detailed report on sta
travel bookings during that vacation period. As these records may be scattered across
many di erent sheets it is really hard to trace these sta travel records in a short time. It
is worse during an audit or when assisting in the investigation of fraud when the sta
travel manager and his team have to go through tons of documentation to meet the
requirement.

Solution:
A centralized and automated solution for sta travel management will ensure the
availability of all the relevant data at a single place. The automated system will keep track
of all activities made through the system, which enables the administrator to get any
speci c real time report on sta travel. Automated audit trails also reduce e ort and
costs of investigations. MIS reports generated through the system helps management to
analyze sta travel patterns to ne tune the policies that govern sta travel.


Challenge 5:
Form of Payment (FoP).
Form of payment is another challenge for the airline. The employee may pay for their
tickets in di erent ways like cash, credit card or payroll deduction. Collecting cash from
employees would mean that the airline has to bear the additional overhead of having a
cashier to process payments. Payroll deduction comes with a lot of overheads – having a
cut o amount for payment, a date until when the employee can make a payment using
payroll option, reconciliation, refunds, and transfer of data to the nance/payroll system.
If an employee uses a credit card, the airline has to bear an additional 1.5% to 2.5 % of the
amount towards fees to the credit card provider. So in addition to the extra cost involved,
these forms of payment, veri cation and processing are really cumbrous for the sta
travel, revenue accounting and nance departments.

Solution:
Airlines can replace the di cult and costly payment methods such as cash and credit
cards with other options which have only a nominal transaction charge. UATP payment
option is a good example. UATP is airline owned global payments network which
provides an inexpensive form of payment for all airline employees, retirees and eligibles
entitled to concession travel. With this kind of a payment option, the payment and
veri cation process can be made simpler and easier with minimal or negligible cost and
e ort.


Bene ts to the airline

Guaranteed ROI

Saves e ort & improves productivity

Can be easily integrated with airline’s existing IT environment

Table1: Airline bene ts from automating sta travel management

Anytime access, reliable and predictable

Easy and quick payment options
Online credit/debit card payment

Reduces e ort, increases predictability, lowers stress

Table 2: Employee Bene ts from automating sta travel management

Conclusion:


Airline Staff Travel Challenges : Solving with Automation

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