Friends and relatives of flyers travelling by Air India will now be able to find out the exact location of the flight at any given point of time, and accordingly make plans to pick the passengers from the airport.
This facility will prove more useful for international flights, where there is a higher degree of poor on-time performance is as compared to domestic routes.
Although the first phase of the project — which can approximate the location of the aircraft — has been put in place, airline officials said they are working on getting real-time locations so that those on ground can get better accuracy on the expected time of landing.
For example, after a flight departs from New York, the user will get to know through where the flight is passing at the time of checking and in how much time it is expected to land at its destination in Mumbai.
“The system is being initiated keeping in mind the convenience of the passenger,” said S Venkat, director (Finance), Air India.
The initiative is part of the over Rs400-crore investment being made by the airline since the past four years to upgrade its technology so as to integrate it with the other member airlines of the Star Alliance group.
“Better customer service is also an important part of our turnaround plan” added Venkat. The officials said that the user has to just feed the flight details and date into the software available on the airline’s website.
While Indigo airlines has also made a similar system available, Indian Railways, too, has made this type of application available to its users, wherein just by feeding in the train details, the user can get its present location along with the railway station it last halted at, among other things.
Meanwhile, Anil Mehta, executive director of corporate affairs, Air India, said they are getting good response from passengers after the revamping of their website. Airline officials claim that in past over five months, they have been successful in attracting a large number of passengers from other airlines by giving them a better experience at a cost marginally higher than low-cost airlines.
