ATW Daily News

Malaysia Airlines transitions to SITA res system

Wednesday November 11, 2009

Malaysia Airlines will announce at a press conference today that it has transitioned to the SITA Reservations platform, part of a 10-year, $130 million contract under which SITA will install/manage a variety of MAS IT systems. The changeover to the SITA reservation system took 13 hr. on Nov. 1 and involved the transfer of almost 1.5 million PNRs. MAS CEO Azmil Zahruddin said, "Upgrading to a new reservations platform is the equivalent of a heart transplant for an airline. Over 3,000 reservations and ticketing staff have been fully trained in preparation for this change."

The SITA Reservations suite of products includes reservations, inventory and distribution with codeshare, automated schedule and reaccommodation management. SITA CEO Francesco Violante said that the "successful [MAS] cutover to SITA Reservations sets a new industry benchmark for how such a complex project can be delivered with minimal disruption. . .The most striking statistic of all is that only 67 PNRs needed to be reworked during the cutover. . . just 0.007%." Under SITA's contract with MAS, it also has implemented an upgraded departure control system to allow the airline to offer self-service options to passengers including kiosk and Web check-in.

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