Supporting our customers through the collapse of the British airline, ‘FlyBe’.

The first job for our Operational Out of Hours team was to send out a travel alert to all customers that were registered to receive information about travel notifications, advisory, or incidents.  They then ran a traveller tracking report that would identify all travellers that were affected by the collapse of the airline - the report confirmed that 188 travellers across 41 customers were impacted.

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The team of 6 experienced consultants began the meticulous job of contacting all travellers that were booked with FlyBe up to Tuesday 31st January. If the team weren’t able to reach the traveller by phone, they sent an e-mail explaining the situation and asked them to call the 24/7 team for help.

 

Contacting these travellers, which covered 68 bookings (between Belfast and Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Southampton and Amsterdam, along with Birmingham to Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen and East Midlands and London to Amsterdam) was our first priority.  We needed to be sure they knew we were there for them and would work to confirm their onward journey and get them repatriated safely.  In fact, by the end of the weekend, our team had contacted all travellers with confirmed flights up to Monday 6th February departure – that was a total of 90 travellers that our out of hours team had helped so far. 

 

Our Business Continuity (BC) protocols were invoked and our incident management team (which included senior stakeholders across Agiito) and key subject matter experts were brought together to conduct a business and customer impact assessment.  The team then instigated our Supplier Failure procedure in line with our BC procedures.  Next steps were for the response teams to set up communications channels and initiate a conference call to assess the impact and discuss next steps. That included: 

 

• Communicating with our customers’ Contract Managers and affected travellers.
   

• Creating an FAQ document to be added to our Support Widget.
   

• Support information for our offline teams to help them work with our customers and ensure we supported with clear and consistent messaging.
   

• Ensuring payment options were seamlessly managed. 

 

Our communication channels remained open until all Agiito’s actions were completed and all impacted travellers had been supported. 

By 11am on Monday 30th January a message was added to Agiito Connect - our customers’ online booking platform advising them of the news that broke over the weekend and the travel advisory issued on Saturday by our Out of Hours team that confirmed the collapse of FlyBe. 

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Working with our Head of Proposition Air and Ancillaries we were able to access ‘Rescue Fares’ for our customers that were unable to get home. These fares were available for travellers who have already started their journey and are unable to get home - they included: 

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• British Airways launched rescue fares available on selected routes and covered flights traveling between former FlyBe routes from London to Belfast, Newcastle and Amsterdam.  
   

• Ryanair launched rescue fares for those who were booked on the now-cancelled FlyBe services enabling them to travel on Ryanair services, including those from Belfast to East Midlands, Manchester, and London Stansted.  
   

• easyJet confirmed that it would offer dedicated rescue fares for customers up to 5th February for both domestic and international routes - they were available on presentation of a FlyBe booking reference.

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Next, the team proactively reached out to all Customer Contract Managers to advise them of our actions to date and give them information for travellers that had not yet started their journey and help them with any applicable ticket refunds, this included what to do if you paid using your own payment card in your name, if you paid using your company’s lodge card or if Agiito paid for your flight. As always, our team were on hand to support 24/7.

 

Over the coming days, our Out of Hours team were supported by online communications posted onto our customer portals and by our Account Managers reaching out to our Customer Category Managers to ensure they were kept informed.  

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We also updated our Support Widget within our booking tool to provide further guidance to those affected - this is the primary channel for information for bookers and travellers.  We then issued a Travel Advisory update to all registered customers with an update on the Collapse of FlyBe and a reminder of the help available to them.