Shop on Board for Red Wings Airlines

In one of the American shows, a comedian Louis C.K. recalls: «When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. You had to stand next to it, and you had to dial it. Do you realize how primitive it was? You’re making sparks!!! You actually would hate people with zeroes in their numbers...When you had no money, you had to go in the bank, and it was open... for like three hours, and you stood in line...

And then, when you run out of money, you just go: ‘Well... I just can’t do any more things now.’ And now, I was on an airplane, and there was high-speed internet, and they go: ‘Open up your laptop, you can use it...’»

Foreword

Today, all airlines do their best to provide their customers with as many quality services as possible. The sale of products and services on board of an airplane is one of such services. Indeed, the introduction of new ways of payment can significantly increase the average purchase amount. However, in real life, the airlines face a host of issues that can only be solved by a combined approach. JoinPAY Fintech Platform with JoinPAY Aero industry business solution enables to do the following within the minimum time limits: introduce the fully-featured system of onboard payments acceptance, reduce the fraud, provide full analytics of sales and provide the following additional services: loyalty, inventory accounting functions, various back-office integrations through the functional API.

Task

Catering Koltsovo has reached out, expressing interest in our JoinPAY service for Red Wings Airlines. The airline is in the process of establishing a transit hub in Ekaterinburg, set to serve up to 25 destinations. Additionally, the customer has outlined specific requirements for seamless integration:

• implementation of the automated multifaceted motivation program for the flight attendants;
• functional API for integration into EGAIS (Unified State Automated Information System) and the company’s back office for communication of the marketing history, inventory, etc.;
• to support the sales on board of the aircraft, the equipment provided, namely, the smart POS, is to be capable of at least 10 hours of autonomous operation;
• the capacity of the inventory accounting module to sell sets of products, to enable sorting of the products in the catalogue as it is convenient for the flight attendants;
• advanced analytics for creation of various reports, as well as the customized reports configuration wizard;
• capacity to account the sales from the perspective of the flight attendant, the route and the aircraft;
• full compliance with Law No. 54-FZ;
• and several other requirements.

The customer emphasized especially the need for the ease of use and the promptness of the project launch.

Technological characteristics

For the convenience of the airline’s flight attendants, we have implemented the operation of the JoinPAY smart POS that enables to accept payments using bank cards and cash.

The POS software has been improved to ensure the efficiency of the flight attendants’ motivation program. When the POS shift begins, two flight attendants are assigned at the same time: the chief (duty) flight attendant and a steward. JoinPAY POS calculates and shows the financial bonus part of each employee. Also, a flight attendant can view how much he or she earned during the flight. This motivates the flight attendants to sell more efficiently from the shop on board.

The important stage of our work was to provide various analytics tools. So, we used the mechanism that is similar to the mechanism that is used in public transport: when the shift begins, not only two flight attendants are assigned (we have already told about it above), but also the aircraft number and its route are designated. Therefore, it became possible to estimate by various criteria how efficiently the shop on board works, to carry out the comparative analysis, build and test various hypotheses.

The products from the shop on board may only be sold when a plane flies horizontally, i.e., is not in climb or descent. In the case of the regional short-haul flights, the horizontal length can be fairly short in time, like 20 minutes. It is very important to attend to the passengers at that time. Therefore, the platform provides for the capacity to group the products, and this makes the navigation in the menu faster. This is how it looks like in real life: Products category / Beverages / Cola, Fanta, Sprite.

The service has been created on the basis of Salut-12F POS equipment (JoinPAY smart POS), which is on the Federal Tax Service register of POS equipment. We have delivered the POS equipment and fiscal memory devices and registered them with the Federal Tax Service.

Training

The training included two stages:

Stage 1. Flight attendants training to work with POS was housed by the convention center of Angelo by Vienna House Ekaterinburg Hotel located next to Koltsovo airport. All flight attendants could familiarize themselves in detail with the functionality of JoinPAY smart POS and perform test transactions. The training was deemed successful because, since the beginning of work with shop on board, the flight attendants were comfortable with it and made virtually no mistakes.

Stage 2. Training of Catering Koltsovo Company was in the remote mode using the screen-sharing modes, trial access to the platform, etc.

The service was quickly launched, providing the customer with essential JoinPAY Aero functionality. Explore the details and request the same service here.

Project participants