Airline ticketing deadlines, tracked automatically for a group-booking desk
Travel & Aviation
The challenge
A travel desk that blocks seats with airlines works against two hard deadlines on every booking — pay by the airline's ticketing time limit, and submit the passenger name list by its own cutoff. Both were tracked by hand on a spreadsheet, and either one missed means the airline releases the seats.
What we built
A deadline tracking system for group bookings, built around the two dates that decide whether a block of seats survives. Airlines are configured once — how many days before departure payment falls due, how many days for the name list, and whether the cutoff time is the airline's own fixed hour or carried back from the flight's departure. Every booking added by hand or imported from a spreadsheet takes its deadlines from that. From there the system watches the clock instead of the staff. Every minute it re-reads every live booking and raises five alerts against each outstanding deadline — twenty-four hours, twelve hours, two hours and thirty minutes before it, and one the moment it passes. Each stage is sent exactly once, to the people who asked for that particular track, and stops the moment the desk marks the payment made or the names sent.
The result
Both deadlines on every live booking are now derived, watched and escalated by the system instead of remembered by a person. Nothing is worked out by hand: the deadline exists from the moment the booking is entered, the alerts arrive with whoever is responsible for that step, and what is due today, due tomorrow and already overdue is the first thing on the screen each morning. The spreadsheet the desk used to keep is now the way bookings get in. Every row is checked against the airline and route masters and shown back as a preview before anything is saved, with airlines and routes the file mentions but the system has not met created as it goes. Bookings whose flights have already left retire themselves overnight, so the list stays the work that is left.