Thinking Big Baby

bmibaby and Continuum in partnership

­bmibaby (www.bmibaby.com) is one of Europe’s leading Low Cost Carriers, and is part of bmi Plc (www.flybmi.com).

bmibaby operates a fleet of 23 Boeing 737 aircraft, principally serving short/medium haul routes to 25 destinations in Europe from its main bases at Nottingham East Midlands, Manchester, Cardiff, and Birmingham International.

Continuum (as GCX) provided the world’s first card scheme compliant DCC payment solution to bmibaby in early 2005.

The challenge

Given the airline’s route structure and planned expansion, bmibaby management wanted the ability to offer ticket pricing in foreign currencies without suffering exposure to exchange rate movements. Management was also keen to reduce the number of complaints from customers concerning the ‘post facto’ conversion of ticket prices by the credit card schemes. The solution was to improve customer service by facilitating those customers (the vast majority) who wanted to pay in their own card currency, and to know exactly how much they were going to pay at the point-of-purchase rather than waiting for their end-of-month card statement.

As an organisation committed to stripping out operational costs, bmibaby was also eager to generate significant additional revenue through the deployment of DCC that would enable the organisation to pass on cost savings to its customers in the form of lower fares without incurring additional cost.

The process

In order to prove the opportunity before committing bmibaby and Continuum resources, Continuum undertook an analysis of bmibaby’s credit card transactions and produced an outline business case determining the value of the opportunity.

This analysis, combined with the obvious potential to enhance customer service by providing transparency in pricing, created a strong business case for the engagement and was approved by bmibaby’s board of directors.

The next step was a detailed scoping exercise to identify key internal and external stakeholders. Interfaces to the airline’s reservation system provider and the airline’s acquiring bank, were determined with bmibaby IT, accounting and commercial officers of the airline.

Continuum then conducted an end-to-end analysis of process, data and funds flows as a precursor to project design. Continuum developed, with bmibaby stakeholders, a key requirements template to provide an agreed format for the project work; Continuum used its industry-leading project methodology and parallel quality assurance programme to ensure everything was detailed to the highest specification.

The process used to design and test the solution for bmibaby, including in-house testing before deployment into bmibaby’s own test environment, included a rigorous real-time test environment that allowed for end-to-end transaction testing with the airline’s external partners (reservation system, and acquiring bank) prior to going ‘live’.

The outcome

Following the deployment of the solution on the auspicious St. Patrick’s day (17 March) 2005, an analysis was undertaken that showed: the solution was exactly on forecast regarding customer ‘opt-in’ numbers (i.e. those electing to pay in their own currency) meaning that the customer service objective had been fulfilled; the revenue numbers met with expectation and Continuum’s post-sales service levels were very much appreciated by bmibaby management and staff alike.

(*) certain data not published for reasons of commercial confidentiality