Q3 Technologies developed a Smart Phone solution for a European Airline company to help their customers with airline reservations and flight status update.

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

The Client is an airline company based in Europe. It is a low-fare European airline, which operates domestic scheduled passenger services and regular charter flights to Europe, Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates.

Business Situation

 

The Client needed an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry that encapsulated all the required functionalities for making flight reservations. The main features required in the application were:

• Request the flight times based on departure and arrival airports
• Specify the date of travel for flights selected
• View all the flights available
• Select the desired flight and select the seat
• Purchase a ticket and make a reservation
• Make payment online
• If payment is successful, save the flight date and time to the handset's calendar
• Search for a reservation using a PNR (Passenger Name Record) number
• Provide a mobile check- in after searching for a reservation
• Alert user one hour before the flight
• Live updates on flight status
• Providing a button that will be put in the application so that when the user clicks the button, it will call the call center of the company.

 

Challenges

The challenges were:

• Engaging and intuitive user interface
• The IPhone and BlackBerry SDKs are loaded with native controls but those controls didn't suit the Client's GUI. Therefore, a number of controls were customized by Q3 for providing the desired look, feel and functionality of the application.

Technical Solution

iPhone:
The iPhone application was developed on the Mac OS using XCode with 3.0 version of SDK and was designed to support iPhone OS v1.1 and above. The Client had provided a WSDL for the Web service. gSoap was used for creating Client and Stubs. These methods of stubs were used from Objective C code from Mac OS. In order to meet with the client's requirement, a number of controls were customized for the GUI and its native look was modified to match up with the required design for mobile check-in.

 

BlackBerry:
A number of customized controls were developed for the BlackBerry Application. JDK 1.6 and NET RIM API 4.7 were used for the BlackBerry application. Stubs were created with help of java wireless kit for the Webservice. The application was designed to support BlackBerry Bold, Storm, Curve and Pearl.

Technologies

iPhone:

• iPhone SDK 3.0
• Objective C
• Soap

Blackberry:

• JDK 1.6
• Net RIM API 4.7
• Java wireless kit

Benefits

Benefits of availability of Airline Reservation and Flight Status over iPhone and BlackBerry are:

• Flight and reservation status is easily available
• Check in can be performed as per convenience
• Ease of seat selection
• Reduced cost
• Increased efficiency
• No restriction of time or location