Business process outsourcing
Multilingual reservations and disruption support for a regional airline
An airline operating short and medium haul routes from the Gulf across South Asia, the Levant, East Africa and Europe.
- Industry
- Hospitality, Travel and Aviation
- Pillar
- Business process outsourcing
- Client geography
- Gulf Cooperation Council
- Delivery location
- Dubai with offshore overnight coverage
- Languages
- Arabic C1, English C1, Hindi C1, Urdu C1, Russian C1, German B2
- Engagement model
- Managed service with surge capacity
- Timeline
- Eleven weeks to launch, surge protocol live from week one
The challenge
Routine reservations volume was manageable. Disruption was not. A single weather event or technical delay could multiply contact volume by six or seven within an hour, across every language the airline serves, at any time of day. The airline's in-house team was sized somewhere between routine and disruption, which meant it was overstaffed most days and overwhelmed on the days that mattered most to its reputation.
What Corpshore did
We built a managed service sized to routine volume in Dubai, with a contractually defined surge protocol drawing on cross-trained capacity in the wider Corpshore network. Surge activation is triggered by the airline's operations control centre and by automated volume thresholds, not by a phone call to an account manager during a crisis.
Surge-trained advisors sit on other Corpshore accounts in normal conditions and maintain currency on the airline's systems through monthly refresher training and quarterly simulation exercises. Disruption handling is scripted for structure but not for language, because a passenger stranded overnight can tell the difference.
Delivery model
Managed service, Dubai core team, offshore overnight coverage for 24 hour service, defined surge tiers with agreed activation times and rates.
Results
- During the largest disruption event of the engagement's first year, the operation absorbed a peak of roughly 6.8 times baseline volume with service level maintained above the airline's disruption threshold.
- Abandonment during that event stayed below the airline's prior best performance on a routine day.
- Cost of the standing operation reduced against the airline's previous over-provisioned in-house model.
- Passenger satisfaction measured after disruption events improved substantially year on year.
Why it worked
Airlines are judged on their worst day. Sizing an operation for the average and then improvising during disruption is the standard industry failure. Pre-committed, pre-trained surge capacity is more expensive to maintain and considerably cheaper than the alternative.
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This is a representative engagement. The client is anonymised, and the figures are drawn from engagement reporting. We do not name a client without written consent, and we do not publish a number we cannot evidence.