Inflight Service Europe chooses Clue® Trader technology for onboard retail
September 2005
Inflight Service Europe AB (IFS) have recently rolled out Clue® Trader SkyPads across the fleets of two of their airlines - Britannia Nordic and Novair. They will be extending this to another two airlines by the end of 2006.
IFS are a concessionaire to airlines in four different countries. Their requirements in terms of an onboard retail system are quite unique, firstly because of the exceptional nature of the inflight retail business in Scandinavia and secondly because of the innovative marketing strategies employed to maximise sales onboard revenue.
IFS have been using their own onboard terminals for some years, but in 2004 they decided that they needed to invest in new technology. Their objective was to find a solution which gives them not only a tool for efficient payment processes onboard but more importantly, means to further explore the sales possibilities hand-in-hand with streamlined front-end and back office activities.
One of the most challenging requirements for the system was the ability to offer complete flexibility for their pre-order business. A few weeks before their passengers travel, IFS send them brochures and catalogues so that they can order any goods in advance of the flight. IFS need to be 100% flexible with how people can pay for these pre-orders - passengers can pay before they fly, while they fly, after they fly or in any combination of these. Passengers can also change their order at any point. In one extreme example, the Clue® Trader system caters for the following scenario: a passenger pre-orders some goods and pays for half of it by credit card in advance; while the passenger is flying he/she orders some more goods and pays for half of the balance; and then pays the outstanding balance a month later. This business strategy combined with the high level of taxation in Scandinavia means that pre-orders are a big business. SkyTrader not only allows for this flexibility, but it provides an intuitive user interface for crew, enabling pre-order sales to be carried out very quickly. This means as well as speeding up the service, everything is recorded on the SkyPads and there is less room for human error.
As IFS are a concessionaire to airlines in four different countries, this creates further complexities. As well as handling the usual multiple currencies onboard, IFS also have different pricelists in different currencies. The IFS pricelist (catalogue and web shop) is today distributed in four different countries and in four different languages - hence four 'base currencies', with a fixed product price for each currency. SkyTrader handles this efficiently, allowing crew to change between different pricelists with ease.
IFS chose to use GPRS technology to transfer the flight data to and from the aircraft (our third customer to use GPRS for this purpose). GPRS was a must because of the logistical considerations - IFS have a central warehouse from where bars are loaded and then distributed to the various bases over Scandinavia. Sending RAM cards back to the central warehouse with the bars would mean that flight data is potentially not downloaded for several days. With GPRS, IFS have instant access to the data once the crew have established a connection after a flight.
At the start of the project, together with their trainers, we developed a customised Computer Based Training (CBT) course for IFS to assist them in their crew training. This CBT course was uploaded onto the company intranet so that crew could access it at any time. Consequently, there was little disruption to crew rostering, as taking crew offline for training was kept to a minimum.
One of IFS's main reasons for using Clue® Trader was their need for a system that is future proofed. For example, they needed a system that is capable of carrying out Chip and PIN transactions as soon as this becomes a requirement in Scandinavia. The Clue® Trader solution provided will enable IFS to upgrade to a certified Chip and PIN solution at any time. The SkyPad is based on a Pocket PC platform, which allows for further development on the devices in the future and they can be used for lots of different applications - not just point-of-sale software.
