Virgin Blue flight delays continue into their second day, with some 116 flights canceled in the last 36 hours, however conTgo has taken this opportunity to promote their Mobile Travel Assistant system.
Virgin Blue blamed their check-in computer system crash on, Navitaire, the supplier of its IT systems. When the computer hardware failed, Virgin had to switch to a manual check-in process that just could not handle the number of passengers travelling around Australia & New Zealand, particularly since the school holidays are now underway in many states.
Virgin made the rare decision to call on passengers to cancel all non-essential travel and was forced to pay for a large number of passengers to stay overnight in hotels.
George Freney, conTgo’s Australian Country Manager said Airline systems are not capable of handling the surge in demand when catastrophic failures occur.
“Without the right communications systems in place for either the airline or the travel agent to contact every single affected passenger by the most simple and immediate method; via SMS on their mobile phone, many Virgin Blue passengers will have travelled to the airport today and yesterday at great expense and inconvenience unnecessarily.”
“conTgo’s Mobile Travel Assistant allows travel providers and agents to send broadcast messages to all affected passengers when a major flight delay incident like this Virgin Blue check-in system failure occurs. This allows passengers the opportunity to make alternative travel and accommodation arrangements or to delay their travel until the chaos has been cleared,” continued George Freney.