Nowadays, many airports offer VIP services. To be able to use these exclusive services, VIPs need to make their reservations in advance. But managing all these reservations and keeping track of numerous open invoices costs airport staff a lot of time and effort. Using Microsoft Power Pages, you can build an intuitive portal where customers and partners are able to manage their reservations themselves.
The most exclusive way to travel by plane
Airport VIP services are, as the term suggests, somewhat exclusive, and often include:
- Check-in assistance
- Luggage handling
- Access to VIP lounges
- Priority parking space
- Private transportation to the aircraft
- …
In order to be able to take advantage of this superior level of service, travelers need to reserve in advance. There are 2 ways to do this:
- The VIP makes the reservation directly.
- The VIP’s credit card company handles the reservation. American Express, for example, offers all of its Platinum Metal Card holders access to all sorts of exclusive travel privileges.
The challenge
One of our customers – a major European airport – was finding it difficult to manage its VIP reservations.
- There was an outdated reservations system in place, so neither the VIPs themselves nor their credit card companies had any kind of overview of their reservations.
- In turn, this meant that the airport needed to provide them with regular updates regarding the status of both their reservations and their open invoices – a labor-intensive and highly inefficient process.
Together with our client, we devised a solution to the problem, in order to give clients and partners more ownership of the process and allow them to manage and track their reservations themselves.
The approach
To tackle this challenge, we built an intuitive reservations platform using Microsoft Power Pages. The portal is accessible to both partners, i.e. the credit card companies, and individual VIPs. Depending on their role, users are given a different view in the portal.
If a VIP contacts the credit card company to make a reservation, for example, the procedure is as follows:
- An employee logs into the portal.
- He or she then provides all relevant flight details and creates the reservation.
- Once all the information has been entered, an airport employee receives and finalizes the reservation.
- Microsoft Power Automate is used to facilitate the reservation flow. For example, confirmation mails are automatically sent to the person who made the original reservation.
The results
Today, all parties involved in the reservations process are already reaping the benefits of the portal:
- Both VIPs and credit card companies can easily create, modify and cancel Reservations can also be paid directly with a credit card.
- In addition, they also receive a complete overview of all reservations and invoices, which facilitates follow-up and allows credit card companies to better manage their VIP stack.
- Airport staff only needs to confirm the reservation. The need for regular status updates is eliminated, and all other communications are automated.
- Afterwards, the process can be handled in the back-end application in Dynamics.
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