Contgo Aids Volcanic Ash Passengers

MEDIA RELEASE
Issue Date: 5 May 2010

Contgo’s Mobile Travel Assistant Continues To Help Marooned Volcanic Ash Passengers


...Hundreds of Thousands of SMS messages have been sent & received as ConTgo’s Follow-Me-Itinerary service evolves into a crisis management tool...

ConTgo is continuing to help marooned passengers all over the world, who still remain stranded due to the backlog of hundreds of thousands of travellers delayed by the closure of European airspace for six days until 21st April. During the ongoing travel chaos caused by the volcanic ash cloud, ConTgo has seen exceptionally high numbers of SMS messages being sent and received by the 30,000 stranded passengers using its Mobile Travel Assistant (MTA) service.

Since European airspace closed on Thursday 16th April, MTA has delivered a record 110,000 SMS high alert messages to affected passengers and has also received an unprecedented 10,000 messages back from travellers, providing current information about their location, the need for travel assistance and requests for other services in response to company-specific questions. Passengers who booked through a participating travel agency and are using conTgo’s Mobile Travel Assistant have been kept fully informed of flight cancellations, emergency accommodation available and meals that are being provided via SMS messages to their mobile phones.

Some Travel Management Companies (TMCs) using MTA have set up special keywords to help their customers through this ongoing flight crisis, including Australian corporate travel specialist QBT, who set up the keyword “ASH” for all of their travellers to use to get access to the latest information. This was communicated to all affected travellers by sending them an SMS message via MTA. A total of 375 messages have been sent and received by QBT’s Australian customers since the crisis started, who have been stranded in parts of Europe and Asia.

QBT’s General Manager David Hughes said: “Mobile Travel Assistant or QBT Connect, as we call it, has benefited both our corporate customers and their business travellers enormously during the volcanic ash crisis by safeguarding their security and pinpointing their exact location. The system has enabled us to keep travellers whose companies are using QBT Connect fully informed and assisted with revised travel plans when the airspace reopened.”

ConTgo’s longest running TMC customer, Kaleva Travel, sent out its largest ever broadcast message of 18,000 messages, which it sent to 6000 travellers in just over two minutes. Then they initiated the largest ever survey by asking more than 6000 travellers to indicate their current location. And Lego established a taskforce to communicate with impacted travellers on an hourly basis. While Microsoft used MTA to determine how many travellers had been caught in Europe and Asia by running a report using the system.

“When the ash cloud crisis started in Europe, our Mobile Travel Assistant evolved into a crisis management tool and has helped over 30,000 affected passengers to stay fully informed of the flight delays and have been kept updated regarding their revised travel plans,” says conTgo’s CEO Johnny Thorsen.

Clearing the ongoing backlog of passengers is expected to continue for another two weeks or so with most airlines having put on additional services to help to relocate up to a million grounded passengers, including British Airways who have flown 14 extra longhaul services from destinations such as Hong Kong, Bangkok and Dubai equating to a total of 90,000 passengers per day. Most airlines are reporting full flights to and from Europe and many have appealed to customers booked to fly, whose travel was not essential, to accept a refund to clear more seats for stranded travellers unable to find flights available for another couple of weeks.

“It has been an amazingly hectic couple of weeks for conTgo, but we haven’t had a single technology failure as a result of the unprecedented volume of messages sent through our Mobile Travel Assistant system. We’ve received some amazing feedback from our customers and have heard many positive stories despite the scale of the ash crisis,” said Johnny Thorsen.

ENDS

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