Qantas check-in glitches 3 Jan

[Robert S]

Anyone got any idea of what's really the story behind QF's check-in dramas today (and the last time for that matter)? They're blaming Amadeus again and all the Australian news reports are dutifully reporting that it would also have impacted other airlines internationally using Amadeus.

Thing is... I can't seem to find any reports of any issues anywhere else but here. Even looking through Google news for reports of the last event are the same. Seems a bit odd when it caused such a meltdown here, both times.

[Brad Myer]

Yea it does effect other airlines....

However when most airlines in USA and Europe are asleep.

Just bad luck and timing for QF

[Michael Morrison]

8.25-9.30am was when the outage happened so that is like 4.30pm-5.30pm New York time or 1.30-2.30pm LA time...

[Robert S]

Exactly... yet no reports of chaos in the US... and I gather United is one US airline that uses Amadeus (though I'm happy to stand corrected).

Similary the incident on 16 November occured roughly between 5pm and 8pm AEDT, which is 6am to 9am UTC, 7am to 10am Central European Time, 2pm to 5pm in Singapore and Hong Kong. Yet only Qantas comes up in any articles on the topic, all of which say that QF rolled out the line about other Amadeus airlines being impacted, but strangely, no articles of chaos anywhere else.

If it is Amadeus related, there appears to be an obvious inference that it's something that impacts QF alone, which is odd.

Two articles appeared today, both by Ben Sandilands - one in Crikey (http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2010/01/03/qantas-may-be-just-another-eyes-wide-victim-of-it-lies-and-errors/) and one on ABC's The Drum (http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2785071.htm), which do question the "blame it on the IT guys" logic, although he continues to accept the story that it impacted airlines around the world, which really doesn't seem to be the case.

[Matt R]

If it is Amadeus related, there appears to be an obvious inference that it's something that impacts QF alone, which is odd.

I'm just guessing, but it might be related to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_IT_Group#Diversification_in_the_airline_IT _business

In 2000, Amadeus took in charge the development of two new operational applications for British Airways and Qantas Airways : the inventory management and the departure control systems. Those products were outside of the core expertise domain of Amadeus and were built with the expertise of the airlines