Virgin Blue hits week long turbulence...
First it was a merger getting knocked back amdist a make over of the Airline, now Virgin Blue hits week long turbulence...leaving travellers in a spin.
VIRGIN Blue has cancelled more flights and shut down online bookings for three days as it tries to bring its computer system back online after another meltdown that stranded thousands.
The latest technology grounding is due to Virgin switching back to its primary operating system after it broke down on Sunday of last week.
A Virgin Blue spokeswoman confirmed Sixteen flights between Sydney, the Gold Coast, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane have been axed today and no flights could be booked online until tomorrow morning.It is hoped the flight cancellations and web booking restrictions will limit chaos while the computer system is restarted.
"People on those flights have been moved to other services and will be only delayed by about an hour," the spokeswoman said.
Flight services Web check, Kiosk check in, Check-mate and Priority check-in were also suspended last night at 8pm and won't be back online until early tomorrow.
The spokeswoman would not say how much the computer glitch has cost, but with an average of more than 40,000 customers each day it is expected to be millions of dollars.
Since Sunday week Virgin Blue has been running on its emergency booking system, but the spokeswoman said it was a "secondary system rather than an emergency system because it has been running fine" since the meltdown.
Virgin Blue's booking system failed on September 26, resulting in more than 100 flight cancellations and delays to every flight during the very busy first weekend of School Holidays.A hardware glitch at Navitaire, the external supplier of reservations and check-in systems, failed just after 8am, forcing the airline to switch to the slower manual check-in system.
Virgin Blue boss John Borghetti said last weekend the initial problem with the primary operating system had been solved.
But by yesterday afternoon Virgin Blue was unable to reveal what the identified problem was and were still waiting for a final report on how the initial meltdown happened.
The spokeswoman said only that the airline was "working closely with [system provider] Navitaire" to get the primary system running. It is widely known in business circles that Mr. Borghetti does not like Virgin Blue's it systems and prefers his former Airline's Qantas check in technology, it would seem that a change after some hefty compensation is imminent.
Ofcourse all of this is happening at a time when Mr. Borghetti is trying to encourage more Business passengers to the airline, however with problems like this, there will be little chance of that strategy working in the short term as corporate travellers can not risk delays in business travel. Then there is the matter of the
ACCC blocking several code sharing deals between Virgin and other carriers as well, further compounding the airlines
ambitious make over plans.
See more Airline Wars here.
Update:
Virgin Blue Holdings Ltd says it will pursue all avenues to recoup the cost of recent computer system failures, estimated at $15-20 million.
The airline's Navitaire-Accenture hosted reservations, check-in and related operating systems experienced a complete outage on September 26, leading to a series of flight cancellations and delays as problems plagued the system for 11 days.
Prior to the outage, Virgin had seen an improvement in general trading conditions when compared to the corresponding period last year, the company said in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).
Virgin Blue group executive Andrew David said last month the airline was considering legal action against Navitaire.
Paul Blazey
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