The few days Virgin Blue would rather forget.

Let’s face it air travel can be very stressful, arriving at the airport on time, dealing with other travellers, queues and the worst of the worst delays and cancelations. The “D” and “C” word is what thousands of Virgin Blue travellers faced when the airlines check in system went into meltdown on Sunday the 26th of September , which just happened to coincide with the AFL grand final in Melbourne and the start of school holidays for ACT, NSW, NT, and SA.

The meltdown caused the airline to commence manual check in which as you can imagine takes twice as long which forced the airline to delay and cancel many of their flights. These cancelations and delays continued for many days as the airline struggled to get back to normal operations. During the delays the airline was responsible for hotel accommodation and airport transport for passengers not in their home town. Virgin Blue also advised that any customer that was delayed over 4 hours would get their total travel cost reimbursed and be re booked onto another day. This was further compounded with additional check in system failures which caused the airline to take their reservation system off line for 48 hours to fix the issues.

So what does this all mean for the airline and the passengers? It has been reported that Virgin Blue lost between 15-20 Million during the check in system failure, both from lost revenue and the associated cost from accommodating passengers during the delays and cancelations. However because the check in failure came from ‘Navitare’ (which is a third party IT airline provider that Virgin Blue uses for reservations and airport control) the cost could be substantially lower due to compensation payments that the airline would be entitled to in the event of such a failure. However the major loss that the airline could experience is from the passengers who were involved in the airport delays, and the potential customers that might think otherwise before booking a Virgin Blue flight. As the saying goes ‘It takes years to build a brand, but just minutes to destroy it’.

This failure also has potential repercussions for the IT provider that Virgin Blue uses, not only from the potential compensation that they may be liable for, but also the bad press that ‘Navitare’ have received from this situation. Three of the 4 major airlines in Australia using ‘Navitare’ this outage could also potentially be a very costly mistake for the IT provider in lost contracts with other airlines. With two other major airline IT players in the Australian market ‘Navitare’ had better watch its back