TRAVELCONSUMERDAILY.COM
SUNDAY, JULY 11, 2010

AIRASIA has successfully completed its migration to a new reservations system a day ahead of time after shutting down computer reservations for the weekend to enable the changeover.

The migration from Open Skies to New Skies, which was expected to be completed at 6pm (Kuala Lumpur time) tonight was completed at 3.15pm yesterday, the airline says.

New Skies is powered by Navitaire, a subsidiary of technology provider Accenture, and is the same system recently introduced by Australia’s Virgin Blue group.

Kathleen Tan, regional head of commercial, AirAsia, said: "We set a record of only nine months to complete this major migration, while other major airlines usually take 18-24 months."

Among the features available in New Skies system is a low-fare finder, enabling viewing of the lowest fare available according to their selected destination and preferred date of travel.

AirAsia customers will also able to book seats for multi-cities in one transaction. For example, people travelling from Perth to Hong Kong or Melbourne to London no longer need to make two separate bookings.

Tan said New Skies reservation system could also support Mandarin, Thai, Japanese and other language characters, making it easier to include content for AirAsia’s multilingual customers.