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Meridiana

Using SITA applications and network communications to deliver on its low-cost high-quality promise

November 2009

Under a seven-year, EURO 17-million deal, SITA has implemented an integrated solution for Meridiana comprising reservation and eTicketing applications, integration technologies and network communications - helping to keep Italy's second-largest private carrier and second fastest growing airline competitive and ontrack to manage solid growth.

Meridiana

Meridiana was originally founded as Alisarda on March 29, 1963 by His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan to promote tourism in Sardinia. Scheduled services began in 1964
and the name Meridiana was adopted from the 3rd May 1991.

With its main base at Olbia, Costa Smeralda Airport, it is Italy's second largest airline, operating domestic and European services.

With other hubs at Cagliari, Florence and Verona Airports. Since December 2006, Meridiana is the main shareholder of Eurofly, a leisure airline based in Milan. In 2008 the combination of both transported over 6.5 million people and the Web sites (meridiana.com and eurofly.it) were the second most visited in the Italian market.

The Meridiana and Eurofly fleet include: 18 MD-82 Mc Donnell Douglas, 8 Airbus A320, 3 Airbus A330, 4 Airbus A319, 2 ATR 42 (operated by Avanti Air).

The business issue and SITA's solution

As a fast-growing airline, focused on delivering high quality at low cost, Meridiana needed to improve its sales and ticketing structure, which was neither scalable nor fully open - and perhaps most importantly wasn't compliant with IATA standards.

At the same time, the airline was ready to embrace better, cheaper and more efficient network communications, through moving away from a pure IP environment and onto a hybrid network, taking advantage of the benefits of using IP VPN in parallel with the Internet, along with smart technologies such as WAN optimization and compression.

We're very pleased to have SITA as our partner in making Meridiana as passenger-friendly as possible.

- Gianni Rossi, Meridiana CEO

Following consultations with Meridiana, SITA recommended implementing a scalable solution, based on its Horizon suite of passenger management services, which would
address both the carrier's applications and Communications needs.

Under the seven-year, 17-million EURO deal signed in 2006, SITA gives Meridiana:

• Cost-effective, fully-integrated, Internet-based, IATA-compliant e-Ticketing
• Integration between SITA's online reservations application and Meridiana's own booking engine via the SITA Integration Platform
• A new passenger Departure Control System (DCS) at all the airports where Meridiana operates, to speed up passenger processing
• IP VPN sites in Sardinia with Integrated Traffic Management (ITM) enabled Juniper boxes, to optimize IP traffic flow and improve application performance

"We were looking for a single solution integrator which could meet our goals by providing integration and value added services," says Gianni Rossi, CEO of Meridiana. "We're therefore very pleased to have SITA as our partner in making us as passenger-friendly as possible through the innovative use of the very latest information technology."

"From an applications perspective, we couldn't be happier," adds Gianni Perniceni, Meridiana's Director of Distribution and Web Development. "SITA's applications are integrated perfectly with our own, and we see the benefits of the implementation on a daily basis. A good example is SITA's Smart Front End, an intuitive graphical user interface which gives our reservations agents in the call centre access to applications like SITA Reservations and SITA e-Ticketing without having to know arcane and
cryptic legacy terms and technology."

On the communications networks side, SITA implemented two main sites, Olbia (where the airline's call centre is situated) and Cagliari, in Sardinia, connected to SITA's main network management and data centre in Atlanta. By using ITM and application-fluent networking, with optimization and compression technologies, in combination with the new applications, SITA ensures that the IP VPN is backed up dynamically by the Internet if problems or bandwidth issues occur.

Not long after the cut-over to the new network environment there was a problem with the IP VPN, and although this lasted for a while, nobody within Meridiana - or any of its
customers - noticed, as the offload of network traffic to the Internet was completely seamless; as was the cut back to IP VPN once the problem was fixed. "Six months down the line, we're seriously impressed with SITA's network performance," says Dino Zuin, CIO of Meridiana. "It allows us to use bandwidth in a really efficient manner - achieving 85% compression rates on the main links - and service our users and customers better than ever before."

Benefits

By partnering with SITA and implementing state of- the-art solutions for reservations, e-Ticketing, DCS and new network communications technologies, Meridiana benefits from:

• Fully scalable e-Ticketing and booking capabilities, already proving their worth with both consumers and third parties, including travel agents
• An optimized customer experience, compliant with all IATA standards and offering the airline the option of allowing additional airlines to join
• Iimproved distribution and business transformation, through offering multiple channels to market while achieving significant cost reductions through more extensive use of passenger self-service
• Optimized IP traffic flow, with network data offloaded onto the Internet when necessary, and traffic compressed at 85% over the main network links.

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