Making reward flight bookings a rewarding experience.
We recently launched our brand new flight-selling platform for Aer Lingus AerClub customers. This innovative project completely transforms the reward booking experience, making it smoother and more rewarding than ever before! Features include an enhanced online journey, better check-in and manage my booking capabilities, and the ability to book a full package holiday using Avios. 🙌
It's the first time since AerClub launched in 2016 that customers will be able to book their reward flights, as well as hotels and car hire, in aerlingus.com, so we're super excited about this huge milestone and wanted the inside scoop from the people behind the product. We caught up with some of the team involved in this launch, to ask the all important questions; the learnings, the highlights, the kudos, Avios spending, and everything in between!
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Image of the new Reward Platform website
Meet Liz Gaskin-Payne, Product Manager - Reward Flights 👋
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Q. Hey Liz, welcome to the blog! What was the most rewarding part of the project for you?
"Watching the team grow not only in expertise in a notoriously complex field, but also how they worked together has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career to date and I'm exceptionally proud of them and what they have achieved. It was also the best feeling when we hit major build milestones."
There's a very funny video of my reaction when we first managed to create a flight booking solely on our platform and then successfully check that test customer in for their flight. I was maybe a little overexcited!
Q. What was it like in the lead up to launch? Can you share an insight on some of the things you were thinking about or testing?
It was crazy to be honest! So much work went into this from the whole team and a launch of this size impacted many areas of our business, let alone the complexity of the build itself. I spent a huge amount of time switching between tech and business to make sure we had everything covered right up to the last minute and that we were delivering the best possible product not only to our customers but our way of working as a business as a whole.
I also was very nervously excited for both myself and the team about how it was going to be received by our customers, it was such a big visible change that we hoped everyone would love it as much as we did and thank goodness, they did as early figures are looking good!
Q. We'll admit it... we're nosey parkers! How did you last collect Avios, and what did you last redeem on?
My last collection was with Uber, now you can book your train tickets via them I buy all my travel to work that way! My last redemption was a Christmas market trip to Copenhagen with my mum and my children last December, highly recommend visiting that time of year and Tivoli was amazing.
Meet Raul Estrela, Tech Lead - Flight Orders ✈️
Q. Hey Raul, how did you find this project? What stood out for you?
Pretty much everything about this project was immensely interesting and gratifying! From having to build a big team to work collaboratively from scratch in the design of a new platform of this magnitude, to the moment where things just ended up working as we initially planned. Combining the success of the project and how impactful it was in everyone's personal and professional growth, I’m really proud of what we have achieved!
Q. What was it like in the lead up to launch for you?
I was very confident that this was going to be a major success because the collaboration between technical teams, product and QA was on point. My biggest concern was the public reaction to the new platform… but I didn’t have to! Getting insights on how well the new platform was being received while monitoring all the systems in the first hours and seeing a LOT of flight orders coming in was so relieving!
Q. We love kudos here at IAGL, anyone or anything you'd like to do a shout-out about from working on this product?
Kudos for Liz and Steven for all the guidance, trust and constant support in our day-to-day development work and doing a flawless job articulating multiple teams and work streams.
Meet Sjoukje IJIstra, Senior Software Engineer - Flight Search and Results 🚀
Q. Hey Sjoukje, welcome to the Loyalty blog! Tell us, how did you collaborate with different teams to deliver this project?
Building a seamless, fast and beautiful flight search experience for our users by untangling business requirements, liaising between several internal teams and external dependencies, and most importantly by delivering code that magically works every time.
Q. Do any of the sprints that led to this launch stand out for you? What did you learn or love about it?
Hooking our taxes and pricing APIs up to the offer service was a particularly challenging and extensive task last year. I collaborated with my teammate JW (Jan Willem!) for several weeks to ensure that all flights and cabin classes were priced and taxed correctly, with lots of niche business knowledge coming from Steven. A few months later, it was super satisfying to build the results page footer that displays all the correct information when a user selects their flights - and in a particularly beautiful way. I really enjoy seeing how many challenging parts of a feature can come together over time and make a positive impact on the user’s overall experience.
Q. Sounds great! Finally, we love kudos here at IAGL, anyone you'd like to shout about?
I’d like to give a special shoutout to our product owner Liz for seeing the vision from Day 1 and fully supporting us through all of our ups and downs on the road to launching flights. Also a huge kudos to Steven for always being there to answer thorny API questions, Rhys for untangling complex situations with us, and our QA team for ensuring everything runs perfectly. We couldn’t have done it without you!
Meet Steven Sintini, Product Owner - Partner Integrations 🤝
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Q. Hi Steven! Tell us, what was the challenge you and the team set out to do?
Our challenge was to create a series of adapters to connect our front-end layers to our Order Management System and to AerLingus shopping and booking APIs. We wanted to make sure our architecture was modular and scalable enough to reduce the time-to-market for the airline partner integrations to come.
Q. Do you have any sprint success stories you'd like to share?
A sprint that stands out for me was when we made the decision to use mature airline industry API standards such as New Distribution Capability (NDC) as an inspiration for our offer and order adapters. It helped us to reduce the analysis overhead and time to market of our software iterations. From there on we were free to deliver incremental iterations focusing on the business value and on our shared definition of MVP.
Q. Any team shout-outs you'd like to make?
I'd thank each and every one of our team leaders, developers, QAs and business analysts.
"Working with such talented, self-organised and productive professionals has made this journey one to remember."
Meet Sophie Burrows, Change Lead - Customer Contact 🎧
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Q. Nice to meet you Sophie! What was your role in this launch?
I supported with the delivery of the customer contact system including requirements gathering, user acceptance testing and supporting the training team with the delivery of training.
Q. Great to get an insight to the Contact Centre side of things. Tell us more!
So my role in the sprints was to support with the prioritisation of what items were to be included in the upcoming sprints to help manage capacity and flow of change for our Contact Centre colleagues, in addition to completing user acceptance testing of those items.
A big thank you to all I have worked with during the project, the collaboration across different areas of the business has made this a huge success.
Meet Sunil Bagga, QA Lead- Reward Platform. 🙌
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Q. Hey Sunil, nice to meet you! So tell us, how did you collaborate with different teams to deliver this project?
Hey IAGL! So we worked across multiple delivery teams to combine a shared vision across the platform. This helped to ensure that features were being delivered to the requirements.
Q. This has been a huge piece of work, do any sprints stand out for you?
One sprint that stands out for me was working through some challenges we found linking up the booking API. It was causing us problems over a few months, but thanks to the determination of IAGL & Aer Lingus tech resources, the problem was solved in the ordering of passenger types in the message sent to the API.
"Identifying the cause was one of the most satisfying moments on the project bringing back the confidence in the platform we all needed."
Q. We love kudos here at IAGL, share your shout-outs for the team!
We've always struggled with User Acceptance Testing (UAT) timelines on the project, but introducing Steven Sintini as the product owner for Travel Agent Portal (TAP) has made a significant difference when making key decisions. Steven with the support of the UAT Lead, Isaac Kanu, ensured a smooth and efficient test phase, delivered within timescales and with the expected outcomes.