Availability in focus for BRA airline

Continued focus on modernisation and high availability for the future when B3 started work on administration and development of the BRA airline’s system.

There are many factors that have to come together when you book an air ticket. You want to see availability and times, compare prices and book your ticket, easily and quickly on your computer or mobile phone. Thus the airlines’ websites have to meet high requirements in terms of optimal functionality, integrating with several underlying systems and always being available.

2.2 million passengers travel annually with BRA (Braathens Regional Airlines) and a large proportion of them are business travellers. The availability requirements are very high. A natural part is of course that the flights must be on time, but it is also important to have a stable and constantly available website for easy booking of tickets. The booking site is an important part of the customer experience for all airlines and by simplifying travel it can also help to strengthen customer loyalty.

BRA has an extensive system portfolio to support all this. BRA’s website consists of several parts. What the customers see, which is edited with a CMS (Umbraco), and the underlying technology with .net and databases. All of the systems are integrated with each other, as well as with the BRAbank and payment system, retrieving customer profiles etc. Apart from this there is also an important integration with the travel industry’s own system Amadeus, which supplies BRA with the actual booking flow after searching for a trip. The environment is complex, which imposes high requirements as regards both development and administration and their integrations.

B3 partnered with BRA at the end of 2018. This is an ongoing project in which improvements and development are taking place all the time, based on requirements from different parts of the organisation, as well as on customers’ feedback.

When the partnership with B3 started, BRA had just launched an entirely new website, which B3 now administers and develops.

An important part of the work is to ensure constant optimal functioning of all integrations, so that no system is down. This requires that the developers have both depth and breadth and are able to work at all levels in a system. At present B3 supplies three senior full stack developers from B3 Poland, who work together with BRA’s Scrum Master and a senior architect in Sweden.

MARTIN NILSSON, CEO OF B3 POLAND