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BA migration to Amadeus encounters “teething problems”
Passengers trying to book British Airways flights are facing longer than average waiting times following the airline’s migration to Amadeus last month.
The switch from the British Airways Booking System (BABS) to the Amadeus sales and distribution system took place in a four hour period on February 24 after a planning process of more than two years.
A BA spokesman told TravelMole that while the “transfer itself went very smoothly”, problems had since arisen which meant that people were having to wait as long as 40 minutes to get through to the airline. He said: “Sometimes it is up, but then it goes down somewhere else or it is operating at different speeds in different locations. We are working round the clock to try to resolve it.”
Amadeus marketing director Mark Lewsey (left) told TravelMole that a project of the sheer size of the BA migration was likely to have “a couple of teething problems” but pointed out that “they are really of microscopic importance compared to the big picture. This has been the largest ever data migration project in the travel industry calendar.”
The project saw two and half million Passenger Name or booking Records transferred, totalling 1,500 gigabytes of data, of which just 1,000 were rejected. In addition 6.5 Million customer profiles were migrated from OCD (operational customer database) to the Amadeus Customer Server – of which only 166 were rejected. More than 300 staff from British Airways were involved in managing the migration, with 13,400 of the airline’s staff trained and set up to use the Amadeus system.
The BA spokesman stressed that overall BA was very happy with the service it had received from Amadeus. He told TravelMole: “It was the biggest ever IT project in our history and it has gone very well. It didn’t cause any flight delays or cancellations. Obviously is not running quite as smoothly as we would like and people are having to wait longer than they would normally do, so we are sorry for that.”
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