Latest / Best of Business / Kate Boyer: Air NZ Ground and In-Flight Chief Operations Officer on the airline revealing a new rebooking system to international flights

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Kate Boyer: Air NZ Ground and In-Flight Chief Operations Officer on the airline revealing a new rebooking system to international flights · Best of Business

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News talksed Be follow
• 0:12
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• 0:16
  Speaker 2: The New Zealand has announced that it is rolling out
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  Speaker 2: a new bit of tech that it reckons can save
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: you hours. The tech will automatically rebook you if your
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  Speaker 2: flight gets canceled, instead of you queuing up with everyone
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: else on your plane for a human to do it
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: for you. Kate Boyer is in New Zealand's Chief Operations
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  Speaker 2: Officer for Ground and in flight and with US. Hi, Kate, so,
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: how are you very well? Thank you? Did I read
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  Speaker 2: right that it's taking what could take potentially six hours
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  Speaker 2: down to twenty minutes?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. So you know, this is something we've
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  Speaker 3: been working on for two years here and we went
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  Speaker 3: live with this system on domestic last year and straight
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  Speaker 3: away we started to see qes just disappeared at the
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: airport as customers got rebooked within minutes often and for
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  Speaker 3: international it can take four to six hours to rebook
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  Speaker 3: a single white body flight. So this month we're going
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  Speaker 3: live with this rebooking system on our international network and
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  Speaker 3: international connecting journeys.
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  Speaker 2: Good stuff. Is this the AI at work?
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  Speaker 3: You know it's not specifically AI in this case, because
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  Speaker 3: we're using an algorithm to search for seats and availability
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  Speaker 3: and make sure we can give customers a sort of
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  Speaker 3: surety on their plans. And for international journeys, you know,
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  Speaker 3: customers are traveling for weddings, for family vacations. Waiting to
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  Speaker 3: know what's happening with your flight is really stressful.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. What if you get automatically rebooked onto a flight
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  Speaker 2: that really doesn't suit you for whatever reason? Can you
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  Speaker 2: override it?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah? So on domestic we have the ability for customers
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  Speaker 3: for self serve, so if we give them an option
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  Speaker 3: and they don't like that option, they can pop onto
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  Speaker 3: the app and search what else might be available for them.
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  Speaker 3: On international, you can still call through and we'll look
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  Speaker 3: for other options for you, and we're continuing to work
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  Speaker 3: on self service there as well.
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  Speaker 2: How are you going on the on time flights? Because
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  Speaker 2: the seats come back give us so slightly from where
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  Speaker 2: it was in June.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always disappointing to see that sort of drop
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  Speaker 3: off because you know, every customer who is delayed is
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  Speaker 3: someone who's not getting where they need to be on time.
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  Speaker 3: But we are in the middle of winter and so
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  Speaker 3: seeing eighty three percent, it's actually six points better than
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  Speaker 3: this time last year. And that's just our ongoing focus
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  Speaker 3: in this space. We are sort of laser focused on
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  Speaker 3: getting better every month for customers, getting them where they
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  Speaker 3: need to be.
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  Speaker 2: Good stuff, Kate, Thank you very much, Kate Boya in
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  Speaker 2: New Zealand.
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