Week 8 Checkpoint: JetBlue &and WestJet: A Tale of Two IS Projects
IT205
April 11, 2014

Week 8 Checkpoint: JetBlue & WestJet: A Tale of Two IS Projects
The reservation system at airlines is the heart of the customer interaction and these systems helps guide the customers through the process of shopping for flights and lets the customers see what seats are available on that flight and then if they find what they want they can go ahead and pay for the tickets right then. Customers use the reservation systems to make the reservations, change reservations, or cancel reservations. They also can select specific seats on their flights, check the bags, and utilizing the kiosks located at the airports to print out boarding passes.
The benefits of upgrading the system would by far outweigh any of the risk once the implementation is completed. The highest risk would be the loss of customers, this would stand true for both WestJet and JetBlue Airlines. JetBlue helped to minimize their risks when WestJet decided to be the first to upgrade and implement. WestJet went live in October of 2009 and it was horrible. They had not evaluated everything thoroughly and it showed. The bottom line is the risks involved is customer service being affected in anyway.
WestJet was the first to undertake the upgrade and implementation. Their customers were having major issues with the reservation services which caused their call centers to get flooded with calls. The influx of customers trying to do business and get their problems solved lead to the website crashing several times. The main issue that plagued WestJet was not anticipating the time and volume of prior customer transaction files to be transferred. It was not thought through about the how to access files while they were being transferred which let to having to adjust flights during this time and this increased customer