ONE Order

How Charter and Go Leapfrogged Commercial Aviation with the New Generation Order Management Capability for Charter Operators

The commercial airline industry (FAR 121 operators) is going through a multi-million dollar information technology investment from airlines and intermediaries to transform the legacy passenger name record (PNR) to what has been called as ONE Order. IATA (International Air Transport Association) introduced ONE Order at its World Passenger Symposium in 2015, describing it at the time as “a single customer order record holding all data elements required for order fulfillment across the travel cycle”. 

The fundamental objective of the ONE Order initiative is to extend the PNR by consolidating a passenger’s personal information and purchases such as an airline ticket and ancillaries within a single record. Given the legacy environment that commercial aviation has been operating in, ONE Order is a major multi-million dollar investment that has taken several years to develop since the introduction of the concept in 2015.

While this concept is new to the commercial airline industry, it is in active use in other industries such as manufacturing and retail. Manufacturers and retailers use Order Management Systems (called OMS) to get a single view of the customer order regardless of where the components are sourced.  

When Charter and Go initiated the process to develop an integrated dynamic offer, price quote, order management, dispatch and performance dashboard solution for air charter operators, the central nervous system of a charter booking was the design of the order management capability. Unlike the FAR 121 operators, the new generation Charter and Go solution is void of any legacy constraints and designed from the ground up with a microservices architecture to operate in the cloud in an AWS Lambda serverless, event-driven computing environment without explicitly provisioning or managing servers. The micro services architecture provides many security benefits including faster implementation of security patches, reduced attack services, simpler code structures and functionality shielding. The single customer order environment manages FAR 135 and FAR 91 charter flights, maintenance events, and test flights. 

The event-driven order management capability, within the context of a charter passenger reservation, brings together all the elements associated with the charter flight booking. The order management capability tracks all data such as the cost of a charter flight, price quoted for the charter flight, payment status, ancillaries, crew assigned to the charter flight, upcoming maintenance events for the aircraft, hotel and car bookings for customer and crew with a single reference order.  Ancillaries is designed to manage add-on purchases by a customer. Examples are catering, Wi-Fi, luggage, entertainment, layover fees, and pets.  Other ancillary services are categorized as charter fees and include a range of items such as financial fees (cancellation fees, cleaning fees, international handling fees, etc.), advisory fees (credit card fees, de-icing fees, etc.), contract management (domestic, international, empty leg) and owner fees for FAR 91 (owner flight, ferry flight, training flight, etc.).

The lifecycle of the customer order is managed in four simple steps – Quote, Accepted, Payment, and Closed.

In Charter and Go’s system all boxes are white initially, the active box is blue and completed steps are black. Quote is the process to price a customer’s request which can be a dynamic price based on market conditions or a pre-negotiated contract price. Once the customer accepts the price quote, the booking is considered sold, inventory status is updated, a contract is generated. The booking is considered in Accepted status after the signed contract is returned.  When a payment has been made by the customer, it is added to the order for tracking purposes.  The single reference order also generates a trip sheet, a broker quote if applicable, a customs form, eAPIS with the required data when crossing borders, and customers are validated against the TSA No Fly List. All relevant communications are documented under Order Notes.  This provides immediate access to a charter operator’s sales team, pilots, and any customer related services.

Ultimately the single reference order in the Charter and Go application is a productivity enhancer for charter analysts and dispatch, where all pertinent activity related to a booking can be viewed and acted upon from the single comprehensive view of the order.

Ben Vinod – Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer