Sun Country enhances customer experience with IT

Now, customers are also able to use IROPS to book their next flights online with speed and ease, Stathopoulos says.

“This is pretty common at big carriers,” he says, noting that many such services are trickling down from big airline carriers to regional carriers.

“You’re standing in line and getting physical pieces of paper to get a food voucher or waiting in line for a Sun employee to book your hotel,” he says of the old process. “Now it’s all self-service. The difference is you’re getting an email, saying we’re having an IROP with voucher options.”

Digitizing for efficiency

The SVP and CIO of Sun Country Airlines, who came from United Airlines in February, says he inherited a robust Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. To complete the project, five or six Sun Country IT pros wrote .NET middleware on Azure, hooking into Databricks AI machine learning models that issue the voucher emails, which in turn connect via APIs to partner services, such as Uber for local travel.

Digitizing these customer services not only yielded cost savings and greater efficiencies, Stathopoulos says, but the self-service options also free up staff and “deflect” calls away from contact center and the airports.

IROPS also required Sun Country’s IT staff to implement a workflow that alerts travelers when there are irregular operations and allows them to change their airline ticket and rebook on another flight.