Sun Country enhances customer experience with IT

To take its digital transformation to new heights, Sun Country Airlines didn’t just take a tip from the big carriers. It hired away one of their seasoned digital tech execs to be its  CIO.

Sun Country Airlines has elevated its customer service since hiring an experienced CIO from United Airlines in early 2023.

Shortly after being named CIO of the low-cost, Minnesota-based airliner last year, Jim Stathopoulos immediately set about implementing automated self-service systems in the form of e-vouchers for customers whose flights are delayed by weather, mechanical issues, or faulty ground service.

Stathopoulos had recently built similar systems for United, where he worked for almost seven years, and aimed to quickly implement the electronic time-savers at Sun Country, elevating the regional carrier’s customer service in short order.

In the past, Sun would hand out vouchers for transportation and hotel rooms to affected travelers standing in long lines at the gate. Now, customers can use the self-service system to access vouchers online from their cell phones or PCs and resolve the situation quickly.

The project, Irregular Operations Self Service & Implementing Automated Accommodations (IROPS), was awarded a 2024 CIO Award for IT leadership and innovation.

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.

“We send an automated e-mail and provide a suggestion for another option or to book with suppliers with capacity on their planes,” Stathopoulos says, adding that the system considers weather patterns when making recommendations. “No wait. No change fees. It automates the communication to the customer with an e-mail and nice workflow for self-service.”

One industry analyst says Sun Country and other regional airliners with tighter purse strings may be implementing such services later in the game but often it’s to their benefit.

“It’s not unusual for small airlines to be later in adopting newer technologies. Even if they dedicate the same proportion of budget to technology as larger airlines, which is around 3% of total revenue, they simply have less money to spend. For budget airlines like Sun Country, it’s not uncommon to see a smaller proportion of revenue spent on technology,” says Henry H. Harteveldt, president and travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group in San Francisco.

“Fortunately for Sun Country, in their case adopting newer technologies later in the cycle may work to the airline’s advantage. There may be better understanding of where and how to utilize it within an airline’s tech stack,” Harteveldt points out.

For Sun Country, rebooking flights and issuing travel vouchers by email are separate efforts but both “piggyback” on the airline’s existing code base.

Sun Country uses a common booking engine called Navigator linked to the airline’s loyalty program. The IT team developed the workflow, UI, implemented middleware plumbing on the Microsoft Azure .NET core, and wrote a handful of machine learning models using the Databricks platform.

The digitization of the vouchers, which entailed writing homegrown code with connections to SaaS APIs, took about three to four months. The workflow code written for rebooking flights took about six months and was ready for launch just before Thanksgiving of last year, one of the busiest travel times of the year.

Stathopoulos’ experience at United was a major factor in getting the IROPS services up and running quickly.

“I came in and implemented nine common practices,” Stathopoulos says. “It was just much faster for me to get going on the vision because I had literally just done it [at United]. I was able to make those decisions quickly. Some of the stuff we outsource but we were very prescriptive on the build versus buy and the IT team was very excited about the build piece of this.”

Follower benefits

Harteveldt of Atmosphere Research notes that latecomers to digitizing customer services often benefit financially and with greater efficiency by having a far more mature set of technologies from which to choose.

“The cost to acquire newer technologies may be less than when they are being first introduced, and the technologies may be more stable,” the analyst says. “Technology vendors may also have a broader selection of products and solutions available, which may provide Sun Country with more possible ready-made solutions, saving the airline time and money versus being an early adopter.”

Enhancing the customer experience helps Sun Country compete against other regional carriers such as Spirit and Southwest, which also serve Sun Country’s main hub in Minnesota. Sun Country has a “symbiotic” relationship with larger carrier Delta Airlines for rerouting passengers affected by irregular operations.

Stathopoulos says the previous CIO did a nice job of migrating to the cloud, creating a data lake, and writing basic Databricks AI machine learning models. To get IROPS to take off, the new CIO tackled problems related to the digital transformation of the industry.

“We hadn’t taken the step of digitizing airline manual processes,” the Sun Country CIO says. “We were already in the cloud, set up a data lake and Databricks was up and running. We made the decisions to go after problems such as high call volumes in our call centers.”

With that foundation, and a new approach to rethinking workflows on the heels of IROPS, Sun Country is well positioned to deliver additional digital enhancements to its operations.