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Automating your airline baggage announcements
Flows

Dec 13, 2022

Flow of the week – Automating your airline baggage announcements

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The holiday season is one of the busiest, and shall we say most stressful times for passengers and airline companies alike, with thousands of people traveling around the globe to visit family. For the passengers there is always that worry of having your flight delayed or diverted due to bad weather, airline strikes and the most worrying of all… the fear of lost luggage, we have all been there at some point. Unfortunately these things happen and when they do it’s not much fun for the airline company either. Let’s face it, no one wants to have to be the one to deal with unhappy passenger complaints of their holiday or worse, Christmas being ruined due to that one-of-a-kind really important gift getting lost or someone mistakenly taking another passengers bag full of gifts and fancy holiday outfits. 

So now you’re thinking, what does Flows have to do with this? Well, Flows is certainly not only for iGaming businesses – Flows can help supercharge ANY business, including Airlines! So for our Flow of the week – let’s take a look at how Flows could help get that baggage information to the passengers as quickly as possible to help take the stress out of this fast approaching holiday season!

Let’s take a look at some examples

Imagine you get off a plane and instantly receive an SMS from your airline – not only welcoming you to your destination, hopefully on time, but instantly including which baggage belt you should head to for retrieving your bag. Not a minute will be lost searching through those huge airport screens to find your flight or even getting stressed just waiting for that screen to update. For you as an Airline – every saved minute for your customer is adding up to that great customer experience!
In this weeks Flow of the week we will demonstrate just how easily this could be automated through Flows!

Now also imagine combining this with flight changes, transfer of information, lost baggage tracking and other Flows to improve any passengers experience. Most airlines manages a lot of information through an app – but this leaves critical information being missed! An app push and/or SMS is crucial to help on those occasions. How about letting your customers choose what they want to track and be alerted on? Or even let them add an extra contact number to be alerted in the case the flight is delayed? Well, you can easily build preferences checks and consents using Flows! 

Since this really is one very simple flow to build – we will also include some further details on the Flows stages in this weeks post. See just how easily you can fill in and build your Flow – without a single line of code!

How do you Flow it? 

Trigger on Baggage Announce

Start your Flow by selecting your Trigger. In this example a trigger has been built called “Baggage Announce”. This can be a Webhook, API or part of a data stream that Flows is listening to. And every time this trigger happens – the Flow starts. So in our example here – the trigger would occur when a baggage carousel belt has been assigned to a flight – the information is then sent in real-time to Flows.

In the trigger, there is data sent that can be used within your Flow. Easily find and use this data using the properties panel. In our example here we see that within the Baggage announce trigger – they are sending the FlightID, departure airport, arrival airport and carousel belt where the bags will be loaded. These fields can be used to update the airport screens to display the information – as well as include this information in the app and in an SMS to the customer. Everything can easily be managed and automated within FlowsEmpower innovation, Connect everything!

How can we get the passenger data?

Once the Flow has been triggered – we select the stage called “Get Manifest” and by sending the FlightID that was available in the trigger – the stage returns passenger data such as SMS consent and Mobile Number.

 

We then continue our Flow by routing it using one or more filters. This means that for the flow to continue on the green path – all filters set in the stage must match. If any does not match – the flow continues on the red path. In our example this week we are routing green if SMS consent is true and baggage is true.  This means the passenger had a checked in bag and consented to receive an SMS. This using the properties that we retrieved through the “get Manifest” stage.

We finish our Flow by adding a stage to call the CRM of your choice to send the passenger an SMS with the baggage belt number and any other information we wish to add. All you need to do is just add in the MobileNumber (that we already have from the “get Manifest” stage) and the messageID. The CRM stages can be built by us at Flows, or yourself if you wish to do so, as an app that is installed in under a minute and contains all the functions you will need to really make it very simple to trigger messages such as email, sms, app-push, web-push or simply updating or retrieving data from your CRM.

Flows – Supercharge your roadmap with one single tool to Integrate with anyone and automate in real-time!

If you want to find out more about how flows can help you to accelerate delivery and supercharge your innovation, get in touch