THE SMOOTH INTEGRATOR
For travelers, the day US Airways reservations cut over to the American Airlines reservation system was just another day at the airport. Leibman’s two-year preparation, envisioning every possible problem, achieved a laudable normalcy.
From a traveler’s perspective, American Airlines’ mid-October switchover of US Airways, the carrier it bought in 2013, to its reservations system was just another day at the airport, thanks in large part to the leadership of chief information officer Maya Leibman. The uneventfulness was actually a huge achievement.
Combining reservations systems after a merger is an intricate process that can create snags for travelers, as United Airlines discovered when it switched to the Continental reservations platform in 2012. Avoiding such disruptions while US Airways’ Shares system migrated into American’s Sabre system required “two solid years of preparation,” Leibman said.
“Our thinking throughout this and what we were focused on was reducing risk,” she said. “Every question that was posed and every decision we needed to make, we would ask, ‘Will this increase or reduce the risk associated with the entire program?’”
Unlike United’s 2012 fiasco—and like Delta Air Lines had done with its own merger with Northwest Airlines in 2010—American spaced out the reservations system and loyalty system cutovers. Loyalty programs merged in March, and reservations wrapped in October. While it would have been easier to move them concurrently, considering how tightly the two systems are integrated, two large, simultaneous implementations simply presented too much risk, Leibman said.
Three months prior to the reservations cutover date, American began a “drain-down” approach, coding those US Airways flights scheduled for after the cutover as American flights. That left American with the simpler task of switching over only those US Airways reservations made more than three months in advance, a small portion of overall tickets, Leibman said.
American also overlaid the Shares interface on the Sabre system in order to mitigate legacy US Airways agents’ adjustment.
During the carrier’s third-quarter earnings call, president Scott Kirby noted the transition had been “largely seamless” and that in the five days following the integration, American had an 89.4 percent on-time record and a 99.95 percent completion factor.
The biggest surprise of the cutover day, Leibman said, was how smoothly it went. “It wasn’t that we weren’t prepared,” Leibman said. “With something so big and complex like this, you never know what can go wrong, but those two years of preparation really paid off, and having envisioned every possible thing that could happen really helped us lay a good plan for the actual cutover.”