BARCELONA, Spain & MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Navitaire and Volotea, the airline of Europe’s small and mid-sized cities, achieved an important milestone in their accelerated journey to the public cloud. Volotea is the first Navitaire airline customer to migrate its entire digital-first airline reservations and retailing platform, New Skies®, to Microsoft Azure. Navitaire, an Amadeus company, provides technology and business solutions to the airline industry, powering more than 60 of the world’s leading low-cost and hybrid carriers today.
For Volotea, the New Skies platform migration to Azure positions the airline to become a data-driven airline, plus enable greater innovation and higher growth via personalized digital experiences. New Skies joins Volotea’s other integrated solutions from Navitaire operating on Azure, including its Digital Platform, payments engine and SkyLedger® revenue accounting platform. Volotea is the first of Navitaire’s customers to move its Navitaire solutions portfolio to Azure.
With the successful migration of Volotea’s full New Skies platform to Azure, Navitaire delivers on its mission to leverage the cloud to enable greater innovation, scalability, security and performance. The move lets Navitaire execute key cloud strategies to improve its operational capabilities with enhanced abilities to dynamically scale, automate resiliency and unlock richer operational insights through on-demand information and optimization. Navitaire migrated its Digital Platform, NDC Gateway, rich telemetry portal and data streaming services to Azure in early 2021.
“Our goal is to enable passengers with a seamless end-to-end experience. For us, migrating New Skies to Microsoft Azure will allow Volotea to stay ahead in innovation, to improve our data-driven strategy, and ultimately to achieve best-in-class personalized digital experience to our customers,” said Alex de Jesús, Volotea’s Chief Experience Officer. “Our digital evolution roadmap aims to be more agile and improve the efficiency of our operations. By building on Navitaire’s cloud services, we are becoming more competitive in providing the best response to travelers' demands,” he added.
“Volotea is a progressive airline that shares our focus on leveraging modern technology to drive sustainable growth and engaging travel experiences, making them an excellent partner to attain this major landmark in airline technology,” said David P. Evans, Navitaire CEO. “We believe New Skies is the first large-scale full reservations retailing and digital platform to operate fully in the public cloud. We’re thrilled to usher in a new era in the industry with our fellow visionaries at Volotea, and to offer more cloud-enabled benefits to all Navitaire airline customers in the future.”
Kyle Stromberg, Navitaire’s Chief Technology Officer added, “Operating our full New Skies reservations platform in the public cloud marks a pivotal moment in Navitaire’s cloud journey. We’re already building on this success and are truly excited about the new possibilities that cloud technology can enable for Navitaire and its customers going forward. Leveraging this powerful foundation lets us further modernize our platforms and applications by incorporating greater cloud-enabled capabilities such as world-class big data, AI and machine learning to help deliver more value to our airline customers.”
About Volotea
Volotea was founded in 2011 by Carlos Munoz and Lázaro Ros, previously founders of Vueling, and is one of the fastest-growing independent airlines in Europe, increasing year-on-year its fleet, routes served, and seats offered. Since its start, Volotea has carried more than 35 million passengers across Europe.
Volotea is based in 18 European small and mid-sized capitals: Alghero, Asturias, Athens, Bilbao, Bordeaux, Cagliari, Genoa, Hamburg, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Naples, Olbia, Palermo, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Venice and Verona. Volotea serves more than 100 cities across 15 countries including Algeria which will be launched in December, from France.
Volotea is becoming a full Airbus carrier in 2021, by renewing part of its fleet with aircraft from the European manufacturer. The airline, which had planned to perform this fleet unification in 2023, has advanced its plans in order to improve its cost base over the next 2-3 years and increase its network offering, with aircraft that have a higher capacity and a longer flying range.
The airline has operated a fleet of 40 aircraft in summer 2021 versus 36 in 2019. In terms of volume, Volotea and has increased its seat capacity by up to 111% compared to summer 2019.
Volotea employs more than 1,350 people across Europe and, compared to its competitors, was the busiest airline in Summer 2020 in terms of load factor, operations and customer satisfaction.
Volotea was elected "Europe's Leading Low-cost Airline" at the World Travel Awards 2021, the industry's most prestigious awards recognizing excellence in the transportation and tourism industry worldwide.
Between June and September, the airline operated a total of 85 new routes and put 3.2 million tickets on sale, demonstrating its dynamism. In October, the airline also won the tender to operate 6 new routes in Italy, connecting Sardinia with Rome Fiumicino and Milan Linate. Volotea also announced the opening of a third Sardinian base in Alghero, in addition to those in Cagliari and Olbia.
About Navitaire
Navitaire (www.navitaire.com), an Amadeus company, delivers industry-leading technology services supporting growth, profitability, and innovation to more than 60 airlines and rail companies worldwide, carrying a total of 819 million annual passengers in 2019, including many of the world’s most successful low-cost and hybrid airlines. Navitaire offers a full suite of proven solutions focused on revenue generation and streamlining costs in reservations, ancillary sales, loyalty, revenue accounting, and business intelligence. Navitaire has offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Amadeus Group. Learn more about Navitaire’s industry leadership in shaping the world of travel at www.navitaire.com.
Navitaire’s New Skies reservations solution is a cloud-enabled digital, e-commerce-first airline platform with comprehensive retailing, analytics, and passenger personalization tools. The solution is designed for efficiency, using a single record approach that manages both the offer and the order throughout the passenger lifecycle. Real-time data for on-demand decision-making and omnichannel processing are hallmarks of New Skies, which are leveraged extensively by airlines with clear industry leadership in innovation.
