Jet Blue Melt Down Essay

The technology department at Jet Blue airlines let down the company during the melt down. There were many areas where if the technology department had been on top of its game this melt down would not have been nearly as bad as it was. These range from simple communications problems to issues with lost bags. The first area where technology let down those at Jet Blue was that of not being able to rebook flights on the internet. This was a major problem as because the website did not allow for passengers whose flights had been cancelled to reschedule they had to call agents. The problem here is many of these agents work from home and the system was only capable of handling 650 calls at a time. If the website had been able to allow customers to rebook it would have taken a lot of the load off of these agents. The second issue we have here is the system only allowed for 650 agents to be on the phones at a time. When you consider they have the normal everyday business along with many flights being cancelled causing angry passengers to call in to rebook this problem became magnified. Customer grew angry with the amount of time that they had to remain on hold to rebook flights. The next issue that lingered was that of being able to identify who owned the lost luggage. This system was a simple one as it only took the technology department 24 hours to design a system to locate these passengers and reunite them with their luggage. However, when you are already upset and angry 24 hours is quite a long time. This was an issue that never should have been as it should have been in place prior to this event. Finally we come to the issue of being able to communicate with off duty crews and know their location when rebooking flights. This issue was one that could have been fixed in a simple manner with a system similar to that  which Nextel offers to customer’s walkie talkie options with a gps locator on the phone. To conclude my findings if the technology department had been doing its job prior to these events the problem would not have been nearly as magnified. Through some simple fixes and forward thinking there could have been several areas that would have helped to make managing this event easier from enhanced phone systems to a website with more capabilities for customers to simple gps enable cell phones this problem would not have cost the company upwards of 30 million dollars.