The challenge

Prior to working with OAG, Swissport sourced schedule data from multiple  sources, such as airlines and airports. Updating their database manually was found to be time-consuming and difficult to validate. Any schedule  changes that came in, whether via Telex, email, or SSIM file, needed to  be updated manually, resulting in processing substantial amounts of data once per week and making changes difficult to track.

As well as an overview of their operational landscape, Swissport were looking to enable and empower their commercial teams with the freshest  data, allowing them to make strategic decisions against the current  industry landscape and react quickly. Swissport needed a tool that would collate accurate schedules data, could be managed from one place, and  exported into various accessible formats for a global multi-disciplinary team.

Eager to future-proof their operations to ensure scalability and  innovation, a solution that didn’t require time-consuming manual  downloading and uploading of data was also key.

Considering Swissport’s global presence in over 280 airports, with  plans for expansion, and serving over 230 million passengers per year,  they needed to have access to reliable and accurate data with versatile  and scalable delivery methods that could grow with them.

The solution

As the leading provider of aviation data and insights, Swissport chose OAG to provide them with a comprehensive view of global airline Schedules and Seats data, refreshed weekly and delivered via Flight Info Direct. Flight Info Direct, powered by Snowflake, is a global aviation data warehouse, containing all of OAG’s data sets, ready to query, integrate and analyze. It allows seamless cross-departmental collaboration and eliminates data silos across organizations, providing instant access to global aviation data.

By accessing Schedules Data in Flight Info Direct, Swissport now has global access to over 70 million forward looking flight schedules and more than 500,000 daily flight schedule changes at the click of a button. They also have access to all other OAG data sets within the same platform, should they need to utilize them in the future.

By provisioning Snowflake, Swissport were able to easily slot Flight Info Direct into their systems and workflows to ensure reliable and automated updates. 

Swissport also stores the data in additional data warehouses, which enables their reporting  teams to create detailed reports and dashboards based on historical and  forward-looking data, providing insight into what was planned to happen  and what actually happened. Seamless integration with a variety of tools has encouraged Swissport to champion data democratization, enabling  everyone in the organization to make data-informed decisions and build  exceptional customer experiences.

The results

Since introducing Flight Info Direct to their operations, Swissport have seen a dramatic improvement in their efficiency across teams and data  accuracy is at an all-time high. The data is used across multiple  Swissport functions, including ground handling applications supporting  baggage reconciliation, lost and found, check-in processes, planning and more.

The reliability and consistency of the data has transformed ways of  working and greatly reduced data processing time as the data is already  validated by the time it arrives at Swissport.

Thanks to accurate data, Swissport have been able to remove their data  validation and manual upload processes, and OAG integrations are now  providing reliable data at the first point-of-call automatically.

New airport customers are now very easy to onboard, meaning Swissport can grow, develop, and expand easily and efficiently, alongside  providing a streamlined and exceptional airport onboarding experience.  In addition to this, by enabling more teams within Swissport with OAG  data, their focus on sustainable scalability and innovation remains  front and center.